Bringing the Best of Brand Management to People at Work Simon Barrow and Richard Mosley The Employer Brand The Employer Brand® Bringing the Best of… [601255]

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Bringing the Best of Brand Management to People at Work Simon Barrow and Richard Mosley The Employer Brand The Employer Brand® Bringing the Best of… [601255]

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The Employer Brand®
Bringing the Best of Brand Management to
People at Work
Simon Barrow and Richard Mosley

The Employer Brand

The Employer Brand®
Bringing the Best of Brand Management to
People at Work
Simon Barrow and Richard Mosley

Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barrow, Simon.
The employer brand : bringing the best of brand management to people at work / Simon Barrow and
Richard Mosley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 13 978-0-470-01273-4 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN 10 0-470-01273-0 (cloth : alk. paper)1. Product management. I. Mosley, Richard. II. Title.
HF5415.15.B375 2006658.3 ¢14–dc22 2005020003
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 13 978-0-470-01273-4 (HB)
ISBN 10 0-470-01273-0 (HB)
Typeset in 12/14 Garamond by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall, UKThis book is printed on acid-free paper responsibly manufactured from sustainable forestryin which at least two trees are planted for each one used for paper production.

To Sheena Barrow and Fiona Mosley

Contents
List of Illustrations xi
Acknowledgements xiiiPreface xv
PART I: THE RATIONALE FOR CHANGE 1
1 Birth of an Idea 3
2 The Changing Needs and Aspirations of Employees 13
3 Investors Awaken 21
4 The People Management Challenge 37
5 The Role of Leadership 45
PART II: THE ‘HOW TO’ GUIDE 55
6 Brand Fundamentals 57
Functional Beneﬁts 58
Emotional Beneﬁts 58Higher Order Beneﬁts, Brand Values and DNA 59Brand Personality 60Brand Positioning and Differentiation 61Brand Hierarchy 63Brand Vision and Brand Reality 64Brand Management and Development 65

Brand Consistency and Continuity 65
Brand Development 67
Summary 68
7 The Business Case 69
The Major Beneﬁts of Employer Branding 69
Lower Costs 69
Customer Satisfaction 71Financial Results 72Summary 74
Life Cycle Beneﬁts 74
Young, Fast Growing Companies: Attracting
‘The Right Stuff’ 74
Coming of Age: Capturing the Organisational Spirit 75Going International: Translating the Employer
Brand into New Contexts 75
Merger and Acquisition: Forging a Shared Sense of
Identity and Purpose 76
Corporate Reinvention: Refreshing the Self-Image 77
Revitalizing the Customer Brand Proposition:
Living the Brand 77
Burning Platform: Re-instilling Fresh Belief 78
Functional Beneﬁts 78Beneﬁts to the HR Function 78Beneﬁts to the Internal Communications Function 79Beneﬁts to the Marketing Function 80
Winning Support from the Top 81Summary 83
8 Employer Brand Insight 85
Employee Insights 86
Employee Engagement and Commitment 88Benchmarking 89Correlation Analysis 91Continuous Research 92Culture Mapping 93Brand Roots 95viii Contents

ix
Projective and Enabling Techniques 96
Observation 99Segmentation 100Communication Audits 102Additional Sources 103
Labour Market Insights 104
Clarifying the Target Market 104
Needs and Aspirations 105Employer Brand Image 106
Summary 108
9 Employer Brand Positioning 109
Brand Identity 109
Monolithic 109Parent 110Subsidiary 110
Brand Integration (Customer and Employer Brands) 110Corporate Brand Hierarchy (Parent and Subsidiary) 111The Key Components of the Positioning Model 113The Brand Reality Model 113The Brand Vision Model 116
Target Employee Proﬁles 116The Employer Brand Proposition 117Values 119Personality 122Beneﬁts 123
Employee Value Propositions 125
Reasons to believe 126
Summary 126
10 Employer Brand Communication 129
Identity 129Internal Launch 130Rational Understanding 132Emotional Engagement 135Employee Commitment and Behaviour Change 141Summary 144Contents

11 Employer Brand Management 147
Big Picture: Policy 149
External Reputation 149
Internal Communication 151Senior Leadership 152Values and Corporate Social Responsibility 152Internal Measurement Systems 154Service Support 154
Local Picture: Practice 155
Recruitment and Induction 155Team Management 156Performance Appraisal 157Learning and Development 157Reward and Recognition 159Working Environment 159
The Key Responsibilities of Employer Brand Management 160
Summary 161
12 The Durability of the Employer Brand Concept 163
PART III: APPENDICES 165
Appendix 1: Reuters Case Study 167
Appendix 2: Tesco Case Study 185Appendix 3: Extract from Greggs Development Review 197
References 201Index 207x Contents

List of Illustrations
Figure 1.1 The employer brand ‘wheel’. Source: People in
Business (PiB) 9
Figure 8.1 How commitment compares across business
sectors. Source: TNS (2002) 90
Figure 8.2 The ISR Employee Engagement Index,
variations by country: Source: ISR (2005) 90
Figure 9.1 An integrated brand model. Source: PiB 111
Figure 9.2 The brand platform. Source: PiB 114
Figure 10.1 The brand engagement model. Source : PiB 131
Figure 11.1 The employer brand mix. Source: PiB 150
Figure A1.1 The ‘Living FAST’ framework. Source:
Reuters (2004) 173
Figure A1.2 The Main Effort Plan. Source: Reuters (2004) 179
Figure A2.1 The ‘Steering Wheel’. Source: Tesco (2004) 191

Acknowledgements
Many people have played a part in shaping the thinking in this book, but
it would have been impossible without the thought-inspiring contribu-tions made by the following people.
Greg Dyke, previous Director General, and Russell Grossman of the
BBC; Alain Wertheimer of Chanel; Tracy Robbins and Tim Small ofCompass Group; Ian Edgeworth of Greggs; Robert Hiscox and BronekMasojada of Hiscox; Dr Stephen Harding and Nick Tatchell of ISR; KenTemple of the John Lewis Partnership; Michael Robinson of Man Invest-ments; Claire Henry of Microsoft; Tom Harvey of Nationwide BuildingSociety; David Roberts of Orange; Camille Burrows of PepsiCo; AnneMarie Bell, Ivan Newman and John Reid-Dodick of Reuters; DavidFairhurst of Tesco; Nigel Brocklehurst and Darren Briggs of Vodafone;Fergus Balfour, Rhodora Palomar Fresnedi, Yuko Miyata and Stephane leCamus of Unilever; and Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP .
Many of the above have kindly allowed us to put their portraits on the
cover, in addition to the following colleagues, clients, alumni, advisors,
consultants and friends of People in Business.
John Ainley, Geoff Armstong, Becky Barrow, Trevor Beattie, Susana
Berlevy, Kashmir Bilgan, Sir Christopher Bland, Richard Boggis-Rolfe,Omberline de Boissieu, Sir Thomas Boyd-Carpenter, Stephen Bubb,Doug Bugie, Christopher Carson, Tim Cole, Chris Darke, ColetteDorward, Rob Drewett, Jesper Edelmann, David Evans, Liam Fitzpatrick,Carmel Flatley, Keith Faulkner, Sir Malcolm Field, Fiona Fong, RichardFoster, Jane Francis, Rod Eddington, Julie George, Joanne Gilbert, AlisonGrainger, Mike Haffenden, Colin Harris, Tom Harvey, RichardHaythorthwaite, Steve Holliday, Glyn House, Simon Howard, HughJaques, Daniel Kasmir, Andrew Ketteringham, Brian Kingham, AndrewLambert, Simon Lockett, Philip Marsden, Luke Mayhew, Jim McAuslan,

Tim Melville-Ross, Trevor Merriden, Richard Needham, Stuart Newton,
Linda Nielson, David Norman, Nia Parry, Harvey Pearson, Amy Pike,Fabiola Pizzigalo, Amin Rajan, Alison Rankin-Frost, Sir RobertWorceste, Nikki Rolfe, Lynn Shepherd, Antony Snow, Andy Street, JohnTaylor, David Verey, Jonny Wates, Lady Bridgett Walters, Laura Whyteand Paul Williams.
We would also like to thank Compass Group for allowing us to feature
a number of the portraits of high performing employees featured in their
recent global employer brand campaign.xiv Acknowledgements

Preface
Books like this tend to get written for two main reasons. One is when
the approach is new and the creators believe they have a missionary roleto introduce a new point of view that will change the way everyonethinks. The second is when the area is well established but the writerwants to add a new dimension to a subject. This book combines aspectsof both. For many this will be the ﬁrst time they have come across thisway of thinking. For others, the concept will be familiar, but its scope ofapplication will be uncertain. Whichever camp you inhabit, we hope thatthis ﬁrst book on the employer brand leaves you clear about its meaningand motivated to put the thinking into practice.
Given that I spent years in the advertising business before my work in
human resources, here is a story about two books that have acted asmodels for this one. The ﬁrst is Rosser Reeves’ classic Reality in Advertis-
ing, a book that changed the way in which advertising is assessed and
measured.
1* Years ago at the Players Club in New York I met Charles
Roman the copywriter who created Charles Atlas who gave hope to ‘97-
lb weaklings who had sand kicked in their faces’ on the basis that ‘youtoo can have a body like mine’. Roman showed me a battered copy ofReeves’ book in which the master had written: ‘to Charles Roman whohas been practising reality in advertising all of his life.’
David Ogilvy, the founder of Ogilvy and Mather, wrote a different kind
of book about the same subject but it was more a celebration of what hethought was great about the business when it is done well. It was calledConfessions of an Advertising Man and, with wit and grace, described
his experiences and the philosophy that had built his agency.
2It contained
gems like ‘the consumer isn’t a moron she is your wife’, ‘salesmen
* Superscript ﬁgures relate to the References section at the end of the book.

don’t sing’, and the power of long copy, ‘the more you tell the more
you sell’ accompanied by a brilliant description of the beneﬁts of the Aga cooker written when he was a salesman for this new product in the1930s.
Where does this book on the Employer Brand ﬁt into such a format?
The employer brand concept has already achieved substantial awareness
among the HR community worldwide. In 2003 an employer brand surveyconducted by The Economist among a global panel of readers revealed a
61% level of awareness among HR professionals and 41% among non-HR professionals.
3Total awareness in the UK was 36%, with the highest
awareness levels recorded in the USA (42%) and Asia-Paciﬁc (45%). Of
the 138 leading companies surveyed by the Conference Board in 2001,40% claimed to be actively engaged in some form of employer brand-ing.
4Conference companies have been running events featuring the
employer brand since 1996. I wrote this on the way back from runningthe ﬁrst employer brand workshop in China and in recent years havespoken in most major markets.
SO WHY NOW?
The number one reason is that this approach lacks the deﬁnition andestablished rigour it needs. ‘Employer branding’ is too often limited tothe look and feel of recruitment advertising or internal communicationcampaigns to sell the beneﬁts of the employer as ‘a great place to work’.These perspectives lack the depth that any recognition of the reality ofthe employment experience must have if it is to carry weight withemployees actual or potential. Here is the deﬁnition that Tim Ambler ofthe London Business School and I wrote in 1996:
We deﬁne the Employer Brand as the package of functional, economic and
psychological beneﬁts provided by employment and identiﬁed with theemploying company.
The main role of the employer brand is to provide a coherent framework
for management to simplify and focus priorities, increase productivity andimprove recruitment, retention and commitment.
5
Secondly, we believe that, like good marketing, this is a fundamental
approach to the way people are managed, listened to and involved. It isn’ta fad. It is a way of working that will last indeﬁnitely. Procter & Gamblexvi Preface

xvii
created the brand management concept in 1931 and it has remained the
basis for running effective customer-facing businesses ever since.
Thirdly, we believe that the Human Resource community needs this
approach to provide the clarity, the focus and the internal platform that
they need to pull together the plethora of activities that make up theirresponsibilities. We have seen the emerging strength of HR people whenthey have grasped the concept of employer brand management and it hasprovided them with the coherence and the zeal that marketing peoplehave long demonstrated. This book is primarily for them and we hopethat it will provide a touchstone and perhaps some inspiration. Theemployer brand approach is a powerful one but only when the sponsorsare powerful and HR must be able to match the pitch of this ball. If theydo not, then others will step into the vacuum. We are starting to see thishappen with titles like ‘Talent Manager’, ‘Resourcing Manager’ and otherinitiatives from Organisational Development, Internal Communicationsand Marketing.
However, the message of this book is also needed by senior manage-
ment. We will argue that the employer brand, and their personal com-mitment to it, can make a valuable contribution to overall corporatesuccess. When management was about the command and control ofhourly paid muscle workers in an environment that favoured capitalrather than labour, then perhaps these thoughts were less relevant butthose days ended years ago.
Returning to the themes with which I started this preface, this book
has two authors, and in some respects represents two books in one. I willdescribe the origination of the Employer Brand concept and the circum-stances that are demanding its acceptance by senior management. My col-league, Richard Mosley, will describe some of the practical steps involvedin applying employer brand thinking to your organisation. We hope thatthis combination of context, motivation, and ‘how to’ will prove an effec-tive formula.
This book could not have been written without the experience we have
gained from the clients of People in Business, in particular Hiscox,Premier Oil, Unilever, Manpower, John Lewis, The Crown ProsecutionService and Man Investments, among others. We also want to thank thosewho have given us their time, including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Reuters,Microsoft, the BBC, Compass Group, Nationwide Building Society,Preface

Orange, Vodafone and Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP , who is respon-
sible for managing one of the most complex employer brands on earth.
Richard and I hope that this book will be useful, inspiring and rel-
evant and that it will provide a helpful basis for all those who are en-
deavouring to make the employment experience in their organisationsboth attractive and mutually proﬁtable.
Simon Barrow
March 2005xviii Preface

Part I
The Rationale for Change
Simon Barrow

Birth of an Idea 1
When I ﬁrst thought of the idea of the Employer Brand it struck me as
utterly obvious. There I was in a new HR-facing job and searching forthe templates that had helped me to be a consumer goods brand managerand then CEO of an advertising agency in London. Good ideas often striketheir creators as obvious probably because there is an urgent need to goabout doing something in a better way.
In this case it was my arrival as CEO of a personnel business. In those
days it was known as Charles Barker Human Resources, and it was part
of the same group as the advertising agency I’d been running, which hadrecently been sold to our US partners NWAyer. I found myself in chargeof an efﬁcient factory producing 100,000 job ads a year, working for over2000 clients and producing 5 million copies of house newspapers, dozensof graduate recruitment brochures and internal communications artefacts.Demand was driven by HR people within client organisations who them-selves were under pressure from line managers seeking to ﬁll jobs fast.Where, I wondered, was the agency planning and the research necessaryto create a strategy that could pull together the organisation’s efforts andguide not only the creative work but also the overall approach to theemployment experience? If this was a consumer brand you wouldn’t runit this way, but of course it isn’t one, it’s something else: it’s an EmployerBrand. That was the moment I saw things differently and have beentrying to apply this perspective ever since in the 18 years that I have beeninvolved in helping organisations to succeed by bringing out the best intheir people.
I was lucky to have had the consumer goods experience that
Colgate–Palmolive and Best Foods (now part of Unilever) had given me.The Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once said that it helped just once

in a life to be associated with something that was absolutely ﬁrst class,
and that’s how I felt about the eight years I spent in brand management.I was given responsibility and inﬂuence, though not power, on everythingthat was likely to have an effect on the health and strength of a brand.This included being expected to know the facts and have an opinion onthe formula, packaging, identity, distribution, pricing, promotion, costs,margin improvement, advertising creative work, media selection, con-sumer and trade research. I was also expected to have the same informa-tion for each competitive brand. Brand management was created byProcter & Gamble in 1931 and has been taken up as a fundamental dis-cipline ever since. It seemed reasonable to see what could be done to applythis thinking to the employer brand experience.
One of the factors that attracted me to Colgate as an employer was the
location. Back in the 1970s it was just about the only top-ranking con-sumer goods business still based in Central London. Most were elsewhere:General Foods to Banbury, Mars to Slough and P&G to Newcastle. WhenI arrived there I found a remarkable group of fellow brand managers whofound London life good for them both corporately and personally. Theyhave all achieved something special since – Barrie Spelling, David Enﬁeld,Tim Chappell, John Plackett, Patrick Bowden, and Martin Forde amongothers. I have sometimes wondered if the company ever considered thelocation aspect and whether the culture has changed markedly sincemoving to Guildford. They also paid better. When I moved there fromBest Foods my basic salary rose 40%. There was no apparent career plan-ning and I don’t recall contact with anyone with an HR title. You wereexpected to make your own luck and, if you were any good, were to beready and able to move to another Colgate location anywhere. That happened to me when I was 33 with an offer to move to Benelux as Marketing Director. The offer was made on a Thursday with a decisionexpected the following Monday. It was time to ﬁnd a more independentlife and after a few months I moved to the embryo consumer advertisingbusiness of the Charles Barker Group.
In terms of Employer Brand thinking, Colgate gave me the theory and
practice in managing all the elements that make up a brand. Charles
Barker provided the people management aspects, which ultimately arethe key success factors, as Charles Barker was later to ﬁnd out to theircost. After four years as an account director I became Managing Director4 The Rationale for Change

5
and later Chief Executive of the consumer advertising business under the
Ayer Barker name, reﬂecting a partnership with the long-established USagency NWAyer in New York. Ayer were famous for creating ads like‘Diamonds are forever’ for De Beers, ‘Reach out and touch somebody’ forAT&T and the highly inﬂuential employer brand campaign for the USArmy ‘Be all that you can be’.
While people think that running an agency is solely about creativity
and salesmanship, the reality is that your ultimate success is determined
by recruiting, engaging and retaining good people. When Anita Roddicksaid, in her moving biography Body and Soul , ‘My people are my ﬁrst line
of customers’, that was entirely what I felt.
1The great value of winning
Sharp Electronics, Chanel, Mercedes-Benz, Barclaycard and Save the Chil-
dren Fund among others was not just the income and the opportunity itprovided to demonstrate our creative skills but the fact that it made theagency easier to sell to good people. The argument for joining was thatthis was an agency on the move. It wasn’t staked out and therefore hadplenty of opportunity and yet it had the backing of what was then themost prosperous communications group in the UK whose Chairman,Kyrle Simond, was by far the best paid boss of any agency group.
Some remarkable people came on board: Charles Channon as Head
of Planning from J. Walter Thompson, Keith Ravenscroft from Ogilvy
& Mather as a copywriter, shortly to be followed by Salman Rushdie whostayed ﬁve years and could be relied upon to understand the strategy andproduce saleable if not brilliant work. When Midnight’s Children
2was
accepted by Jonathon Cape, Salman told me that he wanted to leave thead business. It was 1981 and we had been paying him £15,000 for a three-day week. Cape had told him that the minimum he could expect fromthe book in the ﬁrst year was £22,000 and he felt conﬁdent enough toquit the business. When the book came out he sent me a copy with thesomewhat double-edged inscription ‘to Simon, who helped me write Midnight’s Children three days a week’.
Looking back on those years in the consumer advertising business,
there was one client for whom every step was the enhancement of theemployment experience. That client was Avon for whom we wereworking, thanks to NWAyer in the US. I recall the UK MD Alan Danielssaying that the real purpose of the apparently customer-facing advertis-ing ‘Avon you make me smile’ campaign of the time, was to get 40,000Birth of an Idea

representatives out of their homes and round to their neighbours selling
Avon’s products. They did not call it the Employer Brand back in the1980s but Avon remain past masters in understanding and enthusingthousands of people round the world to spend time with their friendslooking at what Avon have to offer.
After 10 years of running the agency it was time for a change. The Charles
Barker Group was starting to build its already substantial HR stance and as
part of the ﬂotation had bought the executive recruiter Norman Broadbent,then approaching the height of its powers. My job as CEO was to developBarker’s HR business. If the Employer Brand concept was going to be takenseriously it had to impact senior management. I started to see the HumanResource Directors and, if possible, the CEO/MDs of the most signiﬁcantclients. I would establish what they had spent with us in the last year andthen explain that, in the UK in general, they were spending perhaps over£1m across numerous sites and from different budgets. Given that kind ofmoney did they not deserve better research, and better coordination and dis-cipline? It got us noticed and it established bridgeheads with senior clientsthrough which the head of any agency can help, in the words of MartinBoase, founder of BMP , ‘to prevent unfairness’. It also helped to get the causeof better planning noticed, though it would take many years even for thebest to really take this on board.
The employer brand perspective made for a strong point of view and
impressed many clients. Even if the reality did not change much, it led
to a string of high-proﬁle wins that gave us conﬁdence and attracted anew Managing Director for the recruitment advertising business – SimonHoward, then 32, who in time would become a serial recruitment entre-preneur. We won a competitive repitch for Tesco, then under the leader-ship of Ian McLaurin, his commercial director John Gildersleeve and acourageous HR Director, Leslie James, who together realised that Tesco’sreputation needed to be built on the basis of its employees. That wouldnot be done if, as a consultant’s report had told them, the dominantculture was that of fear. Tesco’s radical and positive change to its peoplemanagement strategy started about 1987 and has been consistently fol-lowed ever since (see Tesco case study, Appendix 2).
What could I do to develop the vision? The problem was that the
mass of clients we served were not at a level to buy anything more than
immediate recruitment solutions, so the small consulting business in the6 The Rationale for Change

7
division had to fend for itself. However, here was an area that should be
able to lead the change to an upgraded, better researched and plannedemployment experience in place of a system that simply drummed upnew cannon fodder to replace those who had left. As a result I recruitedBill Quirke, who after a 1st in English at Oxford and later business expe-rience had joined the PR Company Burson Marstellar where he had beenbuilding an internal communications consulting practice. His problemthere was that of being an add-on to the big PR fee earners who didn’tthen understand the importance of people at work. Our second need wasto change the name of the consultancy to distinguish it from the massrecruitment and communications business and be better able to win itsown work.
The name People in Business (PiB) was launched in January 1989.
Despite some early successes, including a global assignment for PriceWaterhouse and Project 2000 for the NHS, the new venture came underincreasing pressure from a new group chairman, David Norman. Davidwas a brisk, self-conﬁdent, warrior type leader focused on results ratherthan vision, and uncomfortable with the creative businesses he had takenon. He regarded my commitment to a soft issue business like PiB as anincorrect use of time and argued that we would make more money if Iconcentrated on the recruitment businesses. In May 1992 he suggestedthat we close PiB to achieve this, and we started a brief conversation thatwould set the course of my life from then on. I said that if he didn’tbelieve in PiB why didn’t I take it on, and we quickly agreed a deal inthe next few days.
I had spoken on the subject of employer branding publicly for the ﬁrst
time at the UK’s Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
conference at Harrogate in 1990 and again in 1991 at another CIPD event entitled Building your Employer Brand . In 1995 we decided to do
some initial research on awareness and understanding and Tim Ambler,
Research Fellow at London Business School, took on the project workingwith MBA students Christian Ingerslev and Andrew Wiseman. Theytalked to 27 leading employers and their HR, Marketing and communi-cations people and the results were published in the Journal of Brand Man-
agement in 1996.
3The results highlighted the following.
Language was an issue. The concept of the employer brand had not yet
entered the lexicon of most HR and communications professionals, andBirth of an Idea

there was some resistance to introducing marketing language to the HR
discipline. Many of the respondents felt that the concept risked havingsome negative overtones, given their perception of marketing as artiﬁcialand manipulative. These comments demonstrated the gap that too oftenexists in the mutual understanding between HR and the marketing function.
While many of the respondents recognised the implicit existence of
the concept, there was some resistance to recognising the employer brand
as a separate and distinct approach. There was certainly some resistanceto adding a further thought process to an already quite big schedule.
•‘We are doing very little to promote an employer brand within theﬁrm. It is something we need to work on but I have more pressingissues.’
•‘Frankly we have so much to do at the moment that we just want toget the basics right. The employer brand concept is not essential.’
The above thought reminds me of the old line: ‘I’ll get on to marketingwhen sales pick up.’
Corporate performance was identiﬁed by several respondents as a key
prerequisite for a strong employer brand:
•‘Reputation is important but you must be successful as a business inorder to have a good employer brand. You have to perform.’
•‘It is difﬁcult for us to build our employer brand because we have nothad good performance during the past two years.’
There was a theme in this research that the employer brand was part ofcommunications, something you could talk about when you were in goodshape. At that time respondents did not necessarily extend the conceptto recognise that they were talking about the employment experience asa whole. This deﬁning feature of employer brand thinking would onlyemerge later.
There was widespread support for the idea that an effective employer
brand approach required senior management commitment and closecooperation between top management, marketing and HR.
•‘The biggest obstacle for a successful employer brand is the lack offunding and buy-in from top management.’8 The Rationale for Change

9 Birth of an Idea
Finally, many people recognised the value of bringing some of the dis-
ciplines of marketing into the HR functions. This included an emphasis
on getting the product right (i.e. the whole employment experience),making use of segmentation and umbrella branding, using compensationwithin the context of other functional or psychological beneﬁts, realisingthe importance of professional communications and developing the tech-niques of relationship marketing. The above represented advanced think-ing for 1996 and nine years later there is still much to be done to makethis a reality.
How did the employer brand concept, and the work Andrew Lambert,
Sue Clemenson and others had put into it, impact on our new venture,People in Business? Buyers of consulting are generally focused on thesolution of an immediate problem. In most cases we used the concept toprovide a robust framework for tackling a wide range of more immedi-ate issues to do with communications and relationships at work. One ofthe earliest tools we used in this context was the employer brand ‘wheel’,an early prototype of our employer brand mix tool (see Chapter 11), whichlays out the key factors inﬂuencing employees’ experience of the employerbrand (Figure 1.1). This provided an excellent framework for facilitating
012345Vision and leadership
Policies and values
Fairness
and cooperation
Corporate
personality
External
reputation
Communication
Recruitment and inductionPerformance
management
DevelopmentWorking
environmentReward
systemPost-employment
Figure 1.1 The employer brand ‘wheel’. Source : PiB

workshops, prompting debate about the sort of organisation people
currently experienced and, in turn, the kind of organisation they wantedto be. I recall a British Airways/British Airline Pilots Association sessionin 1999 at BALPA’s ofﬁce at Heathrow where the longstanding suspicionthat can characterise management, union and ﬂight crew relationships theworld over, was put aside to debate what really matters if the ﬂight crewemployment experience is to be effective. The discussion brought out thereality of ﬂying for BA and has always given me conﬁdence ﬂying behinda BA crew. The key elements were: trust in colleagues, the quality oftraining and training captains, the conduct of simulator testing and thequality of engineering and safety procedures. Of course rewards were animportant dimension but nowhere near the proﬁle that the press makeout. High standards and mutual trust in colleagues was what ﬂying forBA was really about from the pilot’s perspective.
About the same time there was an event that demonstrated the size of
gap that often exists between the customer and the employee-facingdimensions of most brands. That event was the short-lived appearance ofa TV commercial for Sainsbury’s. In the late 1990s Sainsbury’s were con-cerned that shoppers believed that, for all Sainsbury’s middle-classstrengths in quality and service, their prices were higher than theirleading competitors. This was galling because many of their prices werein fact highly competitive.
Sainsbury’s marketing people therefore embarked on advertising which
aimed to put this misconception right. They called it ‘ Something to shout
about ’. Perfectly reasonable you might think. However, the problem came,
as it so often does, in the execution. They wanted a high-proﬁle presen-
ter to talk in store with a member of staff about the real value they offered.I heard from someone on the agency team at the time that Ruby Waxwas the favoured presenter, but for some reason she could not do it andJohn Cleese was hired. The script might have worked with Wax but withCleese, at his Fawlty Towers best, the result was disastrous. The helpfuland well meaning member of staff involved appeared to be totally be-littled by Cleese’s lecture on Sainsbury’s pricing, and whatever the cus-tomer out-take, it caused uproar among Sainsbury’s 140,000 people. Thisstory was covered in the advertising press but dwelt on the future of theiragency and marketing people. From our employer brand perspective, thereal questions were:10 The Rationale for Change

11
•Did the Sainsbury’s marketing people show the original treatment to
anyone in HR, in internal communications or to store management?
•They obviously won approval for it from senior management, in whichcase did the latter even consider the potential effect on employees?
•During production did they test an animatic or later show the ﬁnalﬁlm to any members of staff?
I do not know the answers to these questions, and the personnel of thetime and their suppliers have all left the stage – some earlier than others.
This avoidable commercial tragedy made me think how, in organis-
ational development terms, it could have been avoided. I suspect thosequestions were not asked, indeed not even thought of being asked, andthe silo mentality had gained another scalp.
In October 2000 I introduced the role and job description of the
Employer Brand Manager in a talk I gave to the Association of GraduateRecruiters. We will return to this subject in Chapter 11. However, giventhe above horror story, it is worth mentioning one of the ﬁrst companiesto appoint an Employer Brand Manager – it was Sainsbury’s.Birth of an Idea

The Changing Needs and 2
Aspirations of Employees
On the face of it you might believe that employer brand thinking had
only become relevant for major employers since McKinsey’s ‘War forTalent’ and many similar papers that have highlighted the difﬁculty ofrecruiting and retaining capable people.
1
There are many current pressures today which encourage employers to
treat their people with the same care and coherence as they would valuecustomers. However, the demands for good employer brand managementhave always been with us when expectations of a workforce have beenextreme. In seeking examples of those conditions one has only to look atmilitary history. Biographers of Wellington have always highlighted hissupport for his troops and his determination to move forward only whenthe necessary logistics were in place. His famous words in the aftermathof Waterloo: ‘The next greatest misfortune to losing a battle is to gainsuch a victory as this’, reﬂects his humanity.
2Montgomery in 1943 told
his 220,000 men in the desert: ‘When all this is over and they ask youwhat you did in the war you need only say I was in the Eighth Army.’
3
Like Wellington he was trusted not to risk his forces unnecessarily and,on his deathbed, wondered what the 13,000 killed at Alamein were goingto think of him. That concern plus his surefooted strategic ability andindependence, earned him extraordinary loyalty. This year is the 200thanniversary of Trafalgar and the same values, as well as brilliance, createdthe loyalty of sailors to Lord Nelson. Many of the great employer brandsof the past were military ones.
Most employees over the centuries have been agricultural labourers,
and, for most of the industrial revolution, unskilled workers, with the

pressure to perform being the pressure to eat. Capital, in the form of
employers, needed labour of the most basic kind, whether hard manualwork or repetitive machine minding. While there were much publicisedexceptions, like the early Quaker entrepreneurs, human resources wereplentiful, expendable and cheap. An extreme example of this was thedebate among British plantation owners in the Caribbean in the late eighteenth century on the optimum way of managing sugar production.Which was more proﬁtable: To look after slaves well in the belief thattheir productivity and longevity would show a greater return, or to workthem intensively and then simply replace them with new ‘saltwater’slaves? It was against inhuman calculations like these that Wilberforceand Buxton had to ﬁght for so long to end the British slave trade in 1807and the actual ownership of slaves across the British Empire in 1834. Theinterests of slave owners were powerfully represented at Westminster and the status quo has proved a formidable rampart for employmentreformers to this day. Just consider what was said in opposition to theidea of a UK minimum wage in 1999. The CBI thought then that £4.40was too high a level and would have ‘a very serious impact on jobs andinﬂation’.
4
One only has to read of the slow grudging pace of change in some of
the UK’s major employers to see how recently a very different balancebetween capital and labour existed. It isn’t just Orwell’s description ofcoal mining in The Road to Wigan Pier in the 1930s.
5The American writer
Clancy Sigal, writing about mining in the 1960s in Weekend in Dinlock ,
told the same story 30 years later,6as did D.H. Lawrence in his descrip-
tion of a local mining village in Lady Chatterley’s Lover : ‘The people were
as haggard, shapeless and dreary as the countryside, and as unfriendly
. . . Gulf impassabl e… breach indescribable.’7It is not surprising that,
in the early 1990s, William Woodruff’s Road to Nab End – about his
upbringing in the cotton town of Blackburn in the 1920s – became sucha recent bestseller.
8It struck a nerve for anyone with a childhood in the
North (including mine). The unrelenting pressures of mill work and lifein damp rented houses remain in the DNA for millions. T.S. Eliot’s poemThe W aste Land , describing city workers crossing London Bridge (‘I had
not thought death had undone so many’), expressed a similar blanknessamong white-collar workers.
9Consider Arthur Miller’s line in Death of a
Salesman when Willie Loman, the long-serving salesman of the title, is14 The Rationale for Change

15
dismissed: ‘You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away. A man is
not a piece of fruit.’10John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis and Clifford Odets
all captured the same sentiments about the oppression and drudgery ofwork.
What have been the forces for change? Let us start with the Unions.
While for much of my lifetime UK Unions have been seen as some of the major forces of conservatism, their ability to represent working people and drive change to achieve collective bargaining, health andsafety improvements, paid holidays and improved consultation achievedextraordinary reforms in the period 1890–1960. Organised labour madesure that employers had at least to address the basics, and that has nowlargely been achieved. The future role of Unions remains uncertain, as thedeclining membership over many years demonstrates, but they can stillpack a punch within some of our more traditional public sector services.Organised labour, representing a precious and hard to achieve skill,remains a powerful force. Just think of the Law Society, the BritishMedical Association (representing 193,000 British doctors) and theBritish Airline Pilots Association (representing 9000 ﬂight crewmembers). These are heavyweight bodies and, at their best, they can domuch more than simply protect the historic status quo. They can playtheir part in changing it for the better as well as helping to set standardsand offer personal guidance to members. If they do this they should stillhave a signiﬁcant role to play in shaping the employment experience.
While I would like to think that many employers have now recognised
the beneﬁt of valuing their employees as much as they value their cus-
tomers, I fear that that is not necessarily accepted standard practice. Mostmanagers may nod to it, but what has made Employer Brand manage-ment important is a host of other forces that have little to do with theaccepted management rhetoric on the subject. Beware the CEO who usespat phrases like ‘People are our greatest asset’, before moving on to thenumbers.
For a start, technological innovation has changed what employees
are needed to do. Unskilled manual work represents only 18% of UKemployees. The vast majority do have some technical skill which, howevermodest, is transportable. Of course, there may be too many people withthe same skills and those skills can become out of date. Adrian Furnham,Professor of Psychology at Birkbeck, tells a story about his father, at oneThe Changing Needs and Aspirations of Employees

time one of Fleet Street’s ﬁnest, a linotype operator doing a highly skilled,
sometimes dangerous, job of creating slugs of type from hot metal to formthe basis of rotary letterpress newspaper production. When journalistsstarted to input their own copy directly, the need for that skill disap-peared. In London, in the early 1980s, linotype operators were gonewithin three years.
With the emergence of individual skills has come the need for
improved delegation and therefore empowerment. Business life today is
too complex to put the time into intense supervision or to micro manageother people’s work. As a result, a greater need for trust in employees iscritical, once they know what to do, the standards that are expected, andwhat they can do without recourse to management.
Alongside the technical skills expected in most jobs today comes a need
for customer service and the presence of sufﬁcient emotional intelligence
in dealing with other people, either as internal or external customers. Itis difﬁcult to think of any area today where some level of customer serviceskill is not required. However, I do remember that London Transport’sresearch into the recruitment of bus drivers revealed that one of thereasons for wanting to drive the famous London Routemaster double-decker bus was that the driver was only expected to drive. As theRoutemasters have been replaced by Single Operator buses, this has hadto change to some extent but the interaction between driver and customeris still very limited. It is worth noting that there is also a lengthy waitinglist for the drivers of London Underground trains, where the separationfrom customers is even more complete.
Let us now consider the power of personal expectations. In the early
1960s I remember William Deedes, then a Conservative Minister, speak-
ing to an Advertising conference in Brighton. Deedes asked the confer-ence to consider the impact of new minorities with which we would haveto become increasingly concerned. They were: ‘parents distanced from andeclipsed by their ambitious and high-performing children’, ‘those adultswho did not have saleable skill’ and, sadly, what he bluntly called ‘thestupid child’. He said: ‘Never has it been less fun to be a stupid childthan today’ given the expectation that most of your contemporaries wouldbe taking public exams, with the course set for A-Levels and Universityentrance. Since those days, of course, the opportunities for non-academicsubjects has been increased and the negative effect of being unable to16 The Rationale for Change

17
compete on classic subjects has been lessened. While self-esteem may have
been preserved in this way, the modern job market continues to makesure that the truth will out.
Many people at work today have been active CV builders and career
planners from an early stage. They know that they must attain trans-
portable skills; they know that they must push themselves and assess thecompetition. They have done their homework on themselves, and theircareer management is more likely to be based on realism than simplyaspiration.
Finally, employees are becoming increasingly litigious. Employees are
now more conﬁdent and better able to afford professional advice whenthey believe they have been treated unfairly.
This form of litigation is surely less likely to happen when the culture
of the organisation enables people to express themselves more openly. Our
experience indicates that when employees are given more control overtheir working conditions they also perform better. Provided that peopleare given suitable standards and guidelines, there is also less need for centralised control. As somebody who had to manage people in an adver-tising agency, these are lessons that any leader in that ﬁeld must learnfast. Winston Fletcher’s book Creative People
11is required reading and a
few years ago a Harvard Business Review article entitled ‘How to Manage
Millionaires’ came to similar conclusions.12You have to ﬁnd ways of
getting powerful and independent people to make a contribution and you
do that through recognition, peer group pressure and the desire of theindividual to be associated with a group he or she truly rates. What mil-lionaire wants to be seen to be letting down colleagues in a well-knowncharity? As a result, they are prepared to work very hard. Of course, mostemployees are like that, whether or not they are millionaires. Financialrewards are only important if they are out of line with what is seen as theappropriate rate for the job. Of those interviewed by NOP in 2004, 43%thought that job content was the main motivator in the workplace.
13Only
14% noted pay as the key inﬂuence. For the umpteenth time in nearly20 years of studying the workplace, the number one failure in this reportwas lack of recognition and poor communication. What is particularlyuncomfortable from that survey is that while 50% of employers claimedthat employee satisfaction was important to them, only 6% actually con-sidered it as a major business priority.The Changing Needs and Aspirations of Employees

The need for proper recognition lies deep in most of us. Time and again
PiB’s occupational psychologist John Toplis has revealed the deeply felt
desire of people to receive personal recognition from those they are closeto. When a former colleague of Crispin Davies, now Chief Executive ofReed Elsevier, said he ran the group as if he had a point to prove, it wasprobably because he came from a high-performing family (one brother atthe top of McKinsey, another a partner at Freshﬁelds, and another a HighCourt Judge). That works at all levels too. Remember Jack Ruby, theman who shot Lee Harvey Oswald? When he was sitting in the Dallascourtroom he said to the court artist: ‘Gimme a little dignity will ya?’
The ability to deliver appropriate recognition to others demands so-
called soft skills both interpersonal and intrapersonal. ‘Interpersonal’means leading, communicating, inﬂuencing and working as a team but‘intrapersonal’ actions are what count because they are all about my re-lationship with you and vice versa. Understanding mypersonal motiva-
tion, helping mesolve myproblem, helping memanage myself , that’s when
soft skills demonstrate their worth and are critical to an environment
where ﬂexibility, payment for results and great customer service are whatcounts. That means that bosses must be coaches and be able to generategreater recognition and greater trust.
The demand for recognition takes us on to the delicate subject of
work–life balance. One of the proliﬁc Winston Fletcher’s latest books isentitled Beating the 24/7 , in which he draws on interviews with a number
of successful people such as Sir Christopher Bland, Richard Branson,Dennis Stevenson, Sarah Hogg and Nicola Horlick.
14They all have sen-
sible and pleasant things to say about a properly balanced life, and haveall been highly successful from their early days. I suspect that achievingan appropriate work–life balance for yourself is a function of brain power,planning, delegation and focus. Perhaps some of the people Winstonwrites about have actually had to do the occasional 24/7, but it was aspecial occasion. That is very different to what drives most work–lifebalance commentators, which is the unrelenting long-hours culturewithin some organisations (magic circle law ﬁrms, for example). A TUCofﬁcial (who spoke to Catharine Barnard, Senior Lecturer in Law, andSimon Deakin, Professor of Corporate Governance, both at Cambridge)thought that removing the EC opt out on long hours would have little18 The Rationale for Change

19
impact in the case of white-collar workers ‘because you are talking about
ingrained overtime cultures that are not pay driven’.
In any case, the working time directive is both complex and poorly
enforced. As a result it has not had enough force to counter the UK’s
long-hours culture, and we believe that a prime opportunity to encour-age businesses to rethink inefﬁcient working practices has been lost.
While overtime payments are critical to many people’s ability to main-
tain their current standard of living, it is interesting to note from anInvestors in People survey in August 2004 that 32% of all workingwomen believe that work–life balance is something that employers shoulddeliver for them.
15As British Airways at Heathrow found out to their
cost, interfering with the measurement of check-in staff was not a func-
tion of money, it was the need to manage childcare arrangements. Thework–life balance, thanks to considerable government and private sectorsupport (e.g. Employers for Work lifeBalance), has raised the proﬁle of
this subject and it would be hard to develop the employer brand of any
organisation that did not have a ﬁrm point of view on this issue, howevercomplex the underlying aspects are. One of them is the pressure ofwork–work balance as opposed to work–life balance i.e. when a low basic
hours agreement has been reached, allowing time for employees to engagein other forms of economic activity. Air trafﬁc controllers and ﬁre-ﬁghters have often been mentioned in this context.
What else do employer brand creators have to concern themselves with
in 2005? We should certainly mention growing inequality on both sidesof the Atlantic. In 1980 the average US CEO was paid around 40 timesas much as the average worker, now the multiple is over 400.
16While
the UK and the USA have been able to demonstrate signiﬁcant levels ofsocial mobility, the Cato Institute study of marriage patterns
17may be
putting this movement at risk since, as The Economist puts it in the same
article, ‘yuppies marry yuppies these days’. Small wonder, perhaps, sinceso many people today are working in ghettos composed of nothing elsebut people with similar educational achievements and aspirations. Fur-thermore, the children from those marriages are likely to perpetuate thatlack of mobility by joining high-performance parts of the private sectorfrom private education. In the UK, it is not just Oxford and Cambridgewho have a weighting to those from private education far greater thanThe Changing Needs and Aspirations of Employees

the average. You can also add Edinburgh, Durham, Newcastle, Sussex,
Bristol, Manchester and several others, all of which have undergraduatesfrom private education, and supposedly comprise a vastly greater per-centage of the student body compared with the national average of 8%of all UK children. Just as this volume must affect the culture, valuesand behaviours of these universities, so it may do when these people moveinto the workplace, and employer brand management needs to considerhow a truly inclusive culture is going to be built, given such a range ofraw material.
Finally, any chapter entitled ‘Changing needs and aspirations of
employees’ must address the fundamental question of whether highly
skilled people really want to work for large corporations. Many argue thatwhile big ﬁrms are great places to start, they are not where you want toend up, and it is a shorter step to doing it on your own than it has beenin the past. A client at one of the leading hedge funds, Man Investments,recently drew our attention to the large number of ambitious youngpeople setting up new ﬁrms in this area over recent years.
As Daniel Goleman
18said: ‘There was a long period of managerial
domination of the corporate hierarchy when the manipulative, jungleﬁghter boss was rewarded. But that rigid hierarchy started breaking downin the 1980s under the twin pressures of globalisation and informationtechnology.’ The jungle ﬁghter symbolises where the corporation hasbeen; the virtuoso in interpersonal skills is the corporate future.
In this chapter I have tried to cover what we believe are the prime
inﬂuences on people at work today and these demand real understandingof them by anyone wishing to build an effective employer brand.20 The Rationale for Change

Investors Awaken 3
In the previous chapter we showed the pressures on employer brand
builders in coping with some of the new factors that are demandingimproved employment practice if people of the right quality are going to besuccessfully recruited, retained and engaged. While the areas for consider-ation are many, any writer specialising in people at work matters could havewritten a similar call to arms at any time in the past 30 years.
Why have more of them not been addressed? It’s an important ques-
tion because any new approach, such as the employer brand, needs toassess why it is that so many people-related ideas do not seem to attractthe necessary ﬁrepower. It isn’t just the CIPD; look at any conferenceoperator’s mail shot and spot an area that speakers have not been cover-ing in one way or another for years.
The purpose of this chapter is to review what we believe is going to
be the major change agent for the people-management business – and
that involves the investment community and the shareholders whosefunds it invests. Just as the US President Calvin Coolidge once mem-orably said ‘The business of America is business’, it is the same gut feelingthat drives the way things work world wide. Ultimately, business andcommercial thinking drive what matters at work, inﬂuenced by the ego,ambitions, hopes and fears of the senior executives responsible. No HRbest practice papers ever become reality if they are not linked in to thesecore drivers.
I am indebted to Jeremy van den Arend, an ex-HRD of Reed Elsevier, for
this thought on the promotion records of Navy versus Army leaders which
demonstrates the historically greater importance of physical assets ratherthan people. Historically, the Navy made the tough decisions on promo-tion early while the Army made the tough decisions after an action. The

rationale was that command in the Navy obviously involved a signiﬁcant
capital investment (i.e. a ship) and that was something of much greaterimportance in the historic scheme of things than the military personnelinvolved. Senior army ofﬁcers did get ﬁred for actions that were unsuccess-ful and often incurred an unacceptable loss of life, but there was a greaterlikelihood that they would have been given a greater chance to fail.
That story is relevant because, if the people aspects of business life are
as critical as we believe them to be, then how they are managed in the
context of an organisation’s commercial plan should be a touchstone forinvestors.
Historically, people issues have only grabbed investors attention when
there is a serious disagreement at senior level. That could be over future
strategy but equally likely a disagreement over some cultural or chem-istry ﬁt around who should do what job and how. The other big issue wasa crippling strike in an area where no alternative labour was available. Irecall the near strike of British Airways ﬂight crew in August 1996. It didn’t actually happen but that potential event lost the airline £15million in bookings in the preceding three weeks.
Those two risk areas (senior management disagreement or a strike threat)
pose an immediate risk to both earnings and the external perception of the
ﬁrm in the eyes of investors. Most of what we were discussing in the previouschapter is on a longer time frame, but there is evidence that investors aregetting their minds round the importance of employment issues.
We will review these factors:
•Realisation that the causes of commercial failure often lie not only inmanagement’s strategic ability but in their ability as employers.
•Pressure to change the way the investment community works.
•US, European and UK legislation on compliance and governance.
•Growing awareness among employees of their rights and the threatof litigation.
•And, ﬁnally, the pressures from line and marketing managementdemanding a more effective approach to improve the productivity andattractiveness of the employment experience. Just notice how oftenthe employee subject comes up in brand and marketing literature.
Management must be able to demonstrate to investors that it has the
employment experience well planned, delivered and measured and are22 The Rationale for Change

23
seen to be doing so by analysts and media commentators. Those demands
cannot be met by the occasional piece of good news management cherry-picked from across the company; it needs a coherent, coordinated and constantly measured approach, hence the relevance of employer brandmanagement and the demand for regular assessment it brings.
We will look ﬁrst at the causes of commercial failure due to manage-
ment’s ability as an employer. Having been involved as a consultant in
over 30 mergers and acquisitions from a relationship and communicationstandpoint, I can recall many examples where deals have failed to reachtheir objectives because the employment aspects have not received thenecessary attention.
However, one case stands out where I was involved not as a consultant
but as a senior executive. That was the offer for sale and simultaneousacquisition represented by the old Charles Barker Group, the substantialadvertising and communications business, when it bought the head-hunters Norman Broadbent and, at the same time, went public in 1986. Charles Barker was then the second largest UK-owned communi-cations group with pre-tax trading proﬁts of £2.6 million on a turn-over of £136.6 million. Recognising the proﬁtability and opportunity of HR led the ﬁrm to buy the well-known executive search companyNorman Broadbent. They, too, had had a remarkable record, making £1 million proﬁt on turnover of £3.3 million in 1985. That had beenachieved by a staff of just 18 in London and 4 in Hong Kong and dem-onstrated the extraordinary proﬁtability of a signiﬁcant search company at its peak. Putting the two companies together provided a combinedﬁrm with proforma tax proﬁts of £3.6 million on revenue of £83 million.Given that record, investors rapidly took up 25% of the equity on 21May 1986.
With the beneﬁt of hindsight and nearly 20 years in the study of suc-
cessful employment practices, why would a combined ﬁrm with such a
sparkling record run into the sand a few years later? At least the surviv-ing entity, now BNB Resources plc, still trades and much has been doneby the present management to bring the business back into the black.However, the shares, after numerous dilutions, are only a fraction of the150 p price at ﬂotation.
Against the remarkable promise of the IPO, why did it fail? After all,
the strategic provision of joined-up advertising, communications and HRInvestors Awaken

was advanced thinking. Furthermore, the businesses had some massive
talents as numerous ex-Charles Barker entrepreneurs have demonstrated:Angela Heylin, Angus Maitland and Piers Pottinger in public relationsand Paddy Murray in Sales Promotion, to name but a few. Additionally,London remains full of successful Charles Barker alumni: MichaelPrideaux has been responsible for BAT’s external relations for many yearsand Alan, now Lord, Watson, chairs WPP’s Burson-Marstellar. TheNorman Broadbent business has generated a plethora of independentbusinesses, among them Richard Boggis-Rolfe at Odgers, Julian Saintyof Sainty Hird and Miles Broadbent has emerged as the Miles Partner-ship. It should have worked brilliantly and the reason for its failure layin the management of the employment experience.
To begin with, there was nothing remotely approaching a human
resource management system. There was no HR executive advising onhow best to manage over 700 people. When you reﬂect how mercurial,egotistical, insecure and greedy advertising and communication peoplecan be (let alone headhunters), that was a grievous error.
Of course, a culture of new business winning, publicity, proﬁtability
and rewards does not necessarily engender a culture of thought. There
was no employee research of any kind. Perhaps if there had been (forexample, one of the independent qualitative studies of the type in whichPiB specialises), there would have been a way of putting the truth on thetable and harnessing the joint energies of very different people to addressthe issues that would undoubtedly have emerged. The historic culturealso had a role to play. It was what I would call ‘Old City’ where skillsand personal rewards were inﬁnitely more important than management.That was left for lesser mortals and was reﬂected in the leadership. Allfour chairmen over a period of 30 years, from 1970 to 2000, reﬂected thatculture – Kyrle Simond, Julian Wellesley, Antony Snow and DavidNorman. All of them business developers and instinctive recruiters ofgood people (though no psychological testing of recruits was ever done)but none of them with training or enthusiasm for good HR managementas it is known today, and with David Norman being the only one withany formal business education (a Harvard MBA). I recall, for example,that no training ever took place other than on two occasions, with theimportation of a New York consultant on winning pitches and, at anothersession, a time management guru.24 The Rationale for Change

25
Finally, despite occasional off sites in luxurious country house hotels
there was insufﬁcient clarity on the role of and respect for the group
centre. What value did it add to the businesses? It was always difﬁcultto answer that question because everyone in the senior management was99% driven by the needs of managing their own patch. There were nostated central values and few group activities that pulled people together.A combination of advertising, public relations, sales promotion and head-hunting rapidly became an explosive mixture. That mixture was ignited,as so often happens, by two potential and heavyweight corporate discus-sions, neither of which resulted in a deal. The ﬁrst, in August 1988, waswith Martin Sorrell and his then ﬁnance director Robert Lerwill of WPP;the second was with Peter Gummer (now Lord Chadlington), then chair-man of Shandwick. These would have been handsome solutions had they happened.
The impact of the failure of both these potential corporate changes
resulted in the eventual break up of a group that had been taken publicso recently and so conﬁdently. This story demonstrates that commercialfailure can be directly linked to a ﬁrm’s ability as an employer, howeversound the strategy and the technical abilities of the people.
The second factor for review is the way the investment community has
tended to work and the extent to which it is taking notice of ‘people
issues’ in fund manager assessments today. If skills in managing theemployment experience become more critical, then it should follow thatthe investment community should be demanding a much more rigorousapproach to this aspect in its assessment. Historically, the City has workedon a short-term basis and has limited its assessment from an HR pointof view to what it thinks of the Chief Executive and his/her ﬁnance direc-tor. What has their recent record been in terms of ﬁnancial performance?The provenance of that attitude lies deep in the history of the UK ﬁnan-cial services community. The Economist stated in Sir Alistair Morton’s
obituary in September 2004: ‘Although he read law at Oxford he had nototherwise brushed with the British establishment until he met it in thecity and in government. He never got used to its arrogant, duplicitous,so-polite ways.’
1For Sir Alistair Morton read ‘generations of business
leaders with the same view’, because people who have entered the ﬁnan-cial community seldom have any working experience of industry andcommerce. They respect their own skills rather than that of professionalInvestors Awaken

management and, although they have every intention of earning sub-
stantial rewards, have no particular desire to manage great City busi-nesses. That, of course, is a convenient view because there are hardly anysubstantial City businesses that remain in UK ownership. American,German, Swiss, French and Japanese personnel not only own the majorﬁrms in the City but also hold senior management jobs. As long as theowners still reward skilled Brits for doing what they do well, that seemsto be ﬁne with the latter.
The above conditions are not favourable ground for taking a more
rigorous look at the effect of the employment experience on future ﬁnan-
cial performance. This means spending more time on analysis. A few yearsago we had to assess the views of City analysts on attitudes to a recentlyannounced strategy by the management of a FTSE company. My col-leagues and I were amazed by the range of companies that these so-calledspecialists had to cover within the group of categories for which they wereresponsible. They certainly had no time to work in any depth and theinformation on which they made their judgements had to be accessibleand immediately relevant.
Yet consider the pressures to get more involved. According to the
National Bureau of Economic Research, 32% of the market value of thetop 500 US ﬁrms in 1982 consisted of ‘intangible assets’ – the intellec-tual and human capital that an organisation creates and possesses.
2By
2001, it had moved to being more than 85%. Given that importance,who can dispute that competence in managing relationships is anythingother than a competitive advantage? Shell’s damaging error concerningits estimates of oil reserves reﬂected an employee relationship, values andbehaviours issue at its heart.
Signs that senior line managers and HR people are good at creating
the organisational structure must surely be a key sign of excellence andfuture worth. The Oxford/Cornell Centre for advanced Human Resourcestudies reﬂects the sort of initiatives that are raising the proﬁle of thisthinking.
Similarly, Accenture has published evidence that moving between
large-scale recruitment and redundancies is enormously expensive.
3They
calculated that it cost £9 bn to cut and subsequently reﬁll the jobs of 789,000 people made redundant in the UK between 2001 and 2003. Yethow does the fund manager recognise the beneﬁts of a ﬁrm holding its26 The Rationale for Change

27
workforce together and not making the short-term cuts that the rest of
the market may be doing?
The last ﬁve years have seen pressures on the ﬁnancial community to
take a broader view incorporating the employment aspects of commercial
performance. In 2000 the DTI asked Paul Myners, former chairman ofGartmore Investment management, to produce a report on the City’s relationship with the organisations in which it invests.
4Chapter 5 of
that report spells out the demands that fund managers should be making
of the ﬁrms in which they invest. Rather than sell and walk away, theyshould mix in.
After all, they look after £2500 billion for domestic and overseas clients
both institutional and retail. In the US it is £18.5 trillion under man-
agement but how active are they? Myners says: ‘the most powerful argu-ment for intervention in a company is ﬁnancial self-interest’. He goes onto argue that the fund manager’s clients have the right to expect them toknow when they will intervene, how they will do so and ‘how they willmeasure effectiveness’. Signiﬁcantly, Myners notes that they may need toaugment their skill base and communication processes to do this. Deadright, but they cannot do this by looking only at historic numbers! Surelythey need to demand wider indicators on future performance, includingthe answers to tough questions on HR matters, which we will cover laterin this chapter.
Overall, Paul Myners called on shareholders to challenge bad manage-
ment more vigorously. In particular, he urged them to question the dis-parity between top executive salaries and those below them, and linksenior pay with average salary growth within the company rather thanwith that of executives in other companies. Shareholders should also playa role in the nomination and selection of non-executive directors. In 2004there was a graphic example of this when Sainsbury’s desire to appoint achosen chairman was successfully blackballed by investors.
In February 2003 the Government commissioned a task force under
Denise Kingsmill, then deputy chair of the Competition Commission, toissue guidelines on how quoted companies might report on the subjectof ‘human capital’ – essentially how organisations generate value fromtheir employees.
5Kingsmill argued that annual reports might contain
details on size and constituents of the workforce, retention and motiva-tion of employees, skills and competencies necessary, training needs,Investors Awaken

remuneration, fair employment practices, leadership and succession.
However, it stopped short of proposing any speciﬁc measurements. Today,the Accounting Standards Board is still considering the content of oper-ating and ﬁnancial reviews and is awaiting the result of a working partyon what they should contain. It will be interesting to see what HR meas-ures emerge. Commentators have noted that this working party containedno one with experience in HR.
In our experience as consultants, often with large and sophisticated
ﬁrms, online human capital information is often difﬁcult to obtain. That
must mean that human capital metrics are not studied regularly by seniormanagement. The second hurdle, having gathered material on a regularbasis, is the challenge of publishing it. In our view good companies willpublish because positive statistics in the employment area must increasethe proﬁle of the ﬁrm for recruiters, advisers and candidates. One has onlyto look at the great popularity of league tables within employment to seethe use that ﬁrms make of good scores. The Financial Times andThe Sunday
Times annual assessments are well supported (though mostly by small to
medium-sized companies), and I know how proud one of our clients is tobe regularly featured. Hiscox, the insurance group, has been placed tenthand eleventh in two of the last three years. Not only does this reﬂect thetruth (in our view) about an outstanding company but it has given Hiscoxmanagement greater conﬁdence in making its culture, and the way itmanages its people is one of the most distinctive aspects of the company.
In early 2005 I was a judge on the assessment of 100 companies
selected for a book entitled Britain’s Top Employers , published by Corpo-
rate Research Foundation and The Guardian .
6For the ﬁrst time, under
pressure from judges like me and others, the book has a quantiﬁedelement; an independent assessment formed from 10 dimensions. Theseinclude pay and beneﬁts, opportunities for promotion, training and development, opportunities for travel and international work, companyculture, the ﬁrm’s ability to innovate, diversity and equal opportunities,social responsibility, corporate governance and its environmental record.Note that these 10 dimensions do not include the ability to make money!Surely anyone judging a ﬁrm as a place to work is going to want to knowthe answer to that? However, the publishers argue that if you get theright people and the right strategy throughout the ﬁrm, as well as at thetop, the rest should follow. Indeed, just look at WPP’s mission statement.28 The Rationale for Change

29
You would think that it would be something along the lines of ‘helping
our clients to achieve growth in sales and proﬁts, etc.’. But look at whatcomes ﬁrst. The WPP mission in its 2003 report
7reads as follows:
Our mission: to develop and manage talent; to apply that talent, throughout
the world, for the beneﬁt of clients; to do so in partnership; to do so withproﬁt.
WPP know that if they don’t get the right people they haven’t got a
business.
Finally, there is the pressure on senior teams to improve their general
effectiveness. This has resulted in the work conducted by Sir Derek Higgs
on corporate governance.8The combined code on corporate governance
stated that a listed company should ‘undertake a formal and rigorousannual evaluation of its performance and its committees and individualdirectors’. Given the corporate failures in recent years highlighting theshortcoming of boards whose directors failed to safeguard shareholders’interest, surely few can object to the principles of evaluation. However,recent studies have shown that there is some way to go before undertak-ing these assessments becomes the norm. What will provide more formalimplementation (and faster) will be the fear that, in the event of a ﬁrmbeing under pressure on a performance matter, if the assessments of thesenior people were not in fact done, what action resulted? If anyone hasdoubts about this, just study a Government accident investigation report.When someone is killed or seriously injured, the resulting Health andSafety Executive report is an impressive and reassuring document cover-ing every aspect of the technical and human process issues leading up tothe tragedy. While ﬁnancial failure is not usually associated with death orinjury, it can nevertheless be a human tragedy for millions of investors andwe are moving, correctly, to an environment where ﬁnancial failure canexpect the same rigorous and far-ranging questions on why it happened.
In the past, Health and Safety accident reports often concluded that
technical failure was a cause. As someone now with quite a long experi-ence in the world of ﬂight crew, I read the late Sir Miles Thomas’s auto-biography Out on a Wing .
9When he was chairman of BOAC he had to
cope with no less than ﬁve total hull losses of BOAC aircraft. Mechan-ical and engineering failure were considered responsible for four of them.Now, of course, you could argue that the engineers, planners, testers andInvestors Awaken

other experts responsible for creating and approving the material that
went into the aircraft failed if their work resulted in tragedy, so that bythe severest measures almost all accidents, other than the result of an Actof God, are the result of human failure. However, the design, construc-tion and systems in a modern aircraft are inﬁnitely more reliable thanthey were 50 years ago and, as a result, ﬂying incidents today are mostoften the result of direct human failure, i.e. pilot error or, occasionally,air trafﬁc control.
The news of the failure of fund management in recent years was the
lead story in The Daily Telegraph on 31 May 2003.
10It highlighted the
news that the FTSE had fallen at its lowest to 50% of its all-time high,resulting in black holes for many major pension holders. The initiativesand ideas we have described so far in this chapter are part of an expecta-tion that a major readjustment of how fund managers work is required.One result has, of course, been the rise of the hedge fund. I sometimeswonder how members of the human resource community would per-form as fund managers. Would people with a real grasp of the culture,processes, structure, relationships and leadership of an organisation be ina better position to assess whether they were involved with success orfailure? Would they be in a better qualiﬁed to spot the crispness anddemanding tension that you ﬁnd within a well-managed business?
To help fund managers to prepare for such an assessment we have pro-
vided the following list of possible questions and expected answers.
1. Reputation as an employer
What is unique about your offer to Expect a decisive and research-based
good people? reply.
Your alumni. Can you name people Expect names. All good employers
who have left you and gone on to should be great springboards.
great success?
What is your conversion rate of job A good answer is 75% +.
offers to acceptance?
2. Leadership
How many of the senior executive Expect a balance. If they’re mostly
group were internal promotions external what succession planning
versus external recruitment? has been done?30 The Rationale for Change

31
Is your most senior HR professional Expect yes.
in the top team?
Would he/she be an insider if you If not, why not?
were considering an acquisition?If the organisation is a The answer should be yes. If not,
multinational, is the diversity of there should be a good reason.
the company broadly represented
within the executive group?
How do you lead/manage change? Look for evidence of well-managed
projects where employee views have been consulted and well briefed.
Would any number of staff be able Expect yes (then ask: how do you
to tell me the goals of the know?).
organisation?
How are senior management Expect regular face-to-face (not just
decisions communicated? emails/newsletters/videos).
3. Communications
What do you do to ensure that Look for a regular system of team
people at all levels are aware of brieﬁng with links to the
performance and proﬁtability organisation’s performance.
issues?
How do you promote line of sight Look for managed themes in their
with the customer? internal communication.
What feedback systems do you Expect more than ad hoc, i.e. clear
have? process on down, up and across.
What sharing mechanism do you Expect rigorous mechanisms.
have to spread corporate expertise
and reduce dependence on key players?
When was your last employee Should have been in last year.
survey?What was the response rate? Probe if the answer is below 75%.Investors Awaken

32 The Rationale for Change
How were the results fed back? Should be face-to-face process where
people were involved with local action-planning.
What action did you take in Expect a speciﬁc response, i.e. ‘still
response to key ﬁndings after it considering’ is a bad answer,
was complete? surveys reports should identify clear
areas for action.
If you don’t do surveys how do Should be speciﬁc, processes
you get feedback? articulated.
4. ValuesWhat are the values of your Expect an immediate and succinct
company? answer of 4/5 statements.
How were the values created? The wrong answer is ‘by the management’. Values should be rooted in reality and have been identiﬁed and agreed with employees.
How are they hard–wired into Should have tangible structures,
the organisation? processes, etc., e.g. performance management.
Are they reﬂected in people’s Expect concise answer on
behaviour? communications, clarity, customer
service.
(Supplementary) How do you know Staff survey, appraisal reviews and
that? feedback from training.
5. Employee relations
How many Industrial Tribunal Expect a quantiﬁed answer.
cases have you had in the last year?
What is the trend?
What were the results? Probe if any tribunals have been
lost and why.

33 Investors Awaken
How many potential Industrial Likely to be higher than those
Tribunals have been settled before actually processed through a
an appearance? hearing.
Do you recognise a union(s)? If so, Worry if it is a recent recognition.
when did you recognise it? What In a long-term relationship there
are your relations like? When do should be a partnership agreement
you talk to them? Do you have a and they should be meeting
partnership agreement? informally and/or regularly outside
formal bargaining meetings.
What are your sickness/absence Expect under 5 days per year per
ﬁgures compared to competitors? head.
6. CompensationWhat percentage of total costs are Investigate if higher than
people related? (And how does that competition.
relate to the competition?)
What quartile does your Expect a well-reasoned answer.
compensation policy aim for?
7. Staff turnover
What is your turnover compared to Retail at shop ﬂoor level will be
your competitors? 35% +.Financial service average
is 18%. They should know their competitors and their own numbers .
Have you detected any pattern in Expect a clear answer on why good
your exit interviews? Are exit people leave and what is being done
interviews analysed across the about it.
organisation? What are you doing
to address retention?
We now move to the third factor, which is increasing attention on the
management of the employment experience – that is, the volume of US,
European and UK legislation on compliance and governance. While thepressure on management is one of performance, the wall of new compli-ance legislation reﬂects a much more invasive inﬂuence.

The new internal control disclosure requirements arising, for example,
from Sarbanes-Oxley place public responsibility with management
regarding the effectiveness of internal controls.11These are certain over
the years to inﬂuence the organisational culture, the importance ofquality, control and risk management structures and we know how burdensome the inﬂuence of these new demands are not just for ﬁnancedirectors and their staffs but also for Human Resource executives.
Note the Accounting Standards Board recommendations on perform-
ance measures when they say that those used internally and those reportedon to external stakeholders ‘should not be radically different’.
12Further-
more, the company should focus on measuring and reporting their mainvalue drivers rather than getting the right ﬁgure to satisfy market expec-tations. However sensible this sounds, it presents a real challenge formany excellent businesses we know. Yet good management information,in particular on people, should be the backbone for all strategic planning.Lack of quality information has undoubtedly been responsible for poordecisions, and these errors tend to happen when roles, relationships andthe culture get in the way of good behaviour and communication. Onehas only to think of the extraordinary tale within the previous manage-ment of Marks & Spencer’s when a commentator said that negative cus-tomer research information was withheld from the Chief Executive of thetime! Similarly, reading Bill Vlasic and Bradley Stertz’s blockbuster onthe Daimler Chrysler transaction, published in 2000, it was telling to seehow ramshackle the Human Resource judgements were.
13I have rarely
read a more painful tale of the impact of ego, ambition and pride running
roughshod over good practice. So often the ﬁnancial, political and marketpressures cause dreadful employment decisions to be made.
I know, because I have been there. I recall in my advertising days
coping with the loss of a major account, Anchor Butter. We had createda famous campaign but changes in New Zealand resulted in a review thatwe lost. While the agency was proﬁtable and in good overall shape, andAnchor only responsible for 10% of our income, I overreacted and encour-aged the board to buy a small competitor I had come across which would,at a stroke, add that income back and provide the post-loss ﬁllip I, likeall senior managers, would like to demonstrate. It was a disaster. Theteam we bought were miles away from the hard disciplines we had builtand the business that they brought was ﬂaky. Within a year both people34 The Rationale for Change

35
and business had largely gone. How much better it would have been to
have taken a steadier, longer term and more truly conﬁdent stance. Whilethe stakes at Chrysler or Daimler-Benz were in billions, I truly under-stand the pressures to cut corners on human resource matters even though,at the time, deep down you know you are doing it. The inﬂuence of governance and compliance is to make opportunistic ‘get out of trouble’action less likely and more unforgivable.
It is not, of course, simply investors and legislators who are putting
pressure on management. While they may have awoken to the need for
better management of the employment experience, so too have employ-ees themselves. As they become more skilled, more mobile and more conﬁdent and, in particular, when paid very well, they become moredemanding and litigious. In the past year there have been numerous high-proﬁle cases involving sex discrimination and unfair dismissal in the City.These employees knew their rights, took ﬁrst-class legal advice and hadthe conﬁdence to go for it. These much publicised cases were probablythe tip of the iceberg; hundreds more will have been resolved before goingto court.
It is not only in the world of high-priced City workers that a new
awareness of rights exists. Last year, according to the UK’s Trades UnionCouncil (TUC), three in ﬁve workers now complain of being stressed atwork, with stress-related absence accounting for an estimated 6.5 millionworking days lost per year.
14In addition, 6428 companies were forced to
pay damages for workplace stress with an average payment of £51,000 –a 12-fold increase in the number of employees who successfully sued theiremployers in 2000. The TUC have reported that overload was the maincause of stress at work and their league table showed central governmentto be top of the list. You will have noted that we included the numberof industrial tribunals and similar work-related disagreements in our listof questions for fund managers. I have long believed that there is a cor-relation between the number of cases requiring the advice of an employ-ment lawyer and the quality of senior management in the organisationconcerned.
Finally in this chapter let us look at the pressures within organisa-
tions from line and marketing management demanding a more effectiveapproach to improve the productivity and attractiveness of the employ-ment experience. Over the years I have observed that there is no greaterInvestors Awaken

pressure for HR people than that from colleagues to recruit quality people
and to do so fast. For all the reasons we have covered in the book so far,line management and marketing people now seem well aware of how vitalit is to recruit, retain and motivate the appropriate talent. That type ofpressure is now so great that there are signs that, if Human Resourcescannot deliver, line management will take it on themselves. We haveargued in this chapter that the City’s tectonic plates are moving and thatinvestors are watching the management of the employment experience,and so are governments through tougher compliance regimes. The pressure that creates is now being felt by the Human Resource world and that is the subject for the next chapter – The People ManagementChallenge.36 The Rationale for Change

The People 4
Management Challenge
In October each year, The UK Chartered Institute of Personnel and Devel-
opment (CIPD), the trade body of the HR world, invites its 125,000members to an annual conference at Harrogate. About 2500 of these showup, making it the biggest commercial conference held in the UK. I ﬁrstwent to this event two weeks after starting my HR-facing career back in1986. One of the themes in the conference that year, and it seems everyyear since, has been something along the lines of ‘Whither HR?’ orsimilar questions aiming to prompt discussions on the present and futurerole, the lack of power and what to do about it, whether or not the seniorHR executive should be on the board of the organisation, etc., etc. Manyof these questions are as unresolved now as they were then. Yet, as thepreceding chapters in this book have argued, the need for powerful, pro-fessional, engaged HR executives has never been greater.
One of the bases on which this book has been created is that you cannot
easily pick at one element that makes up the employment experience; you
have to look at it in its entirety, just as you look at a brand in its entirety.However, it is interesting to see the effect that one well-timed and suc-cinct expression of a major single issue has driven a change within theHR ﬁeld. That was the McKinsey Quarterly in 1998 on ‘The War for
Talent’,
1in which this noble quote appeared:
Companies are about to be engaged in a war for senior executive talent that
will remain a deﬁning characteristic of their competitive landscape fordecades to come. Yet most are ill prepared and even the best are vulnerable.
Incidentally, note the selective nature of this opinion. While the head-
line ‘The War for Talent’ has been used in a general sense, in fact the real

issue in McKinsey’s view was for top talent. That may be true; certainly
according to executive search people, but it actually impacts a muchbroader range of talent in an organisation. In the ﬁrst quarter of 2005there are recruitment challenges across a much wider range of levels andspecialisms.
The impact this pressure is having is indicative of the need for change
within HR itself. We are seeing quasi-marketing titles emerging like
‘Director of Talent’, ‘Director of Recruitment Marketing’, and ‘PeopleDirector’. In a well-known American bank the creation of the graduaterecruitment offer has been moved to the marketing function. In our experience the internal communications role tends to lie within Cor-porate Affairs rather than HR. Yet without HR’s hands on the ropes ofcommunications it restricts the function’s day-to-day involvement withwhat actually happens in managing the action. Study the line up in Acqui-
sitions Monthly ’s review of merger and acquisitions. You will see the name
of the chief executive, the ﬁnance director, the bank, the lawyer and the
communications agency – the latter being a critical ingredient not onlyin hostile bids but in the run up to an agreed transaction. While mergersand acquisitions are unique events they demonstrate what happens whenthe gloves are off, and coordinated coherent action at the top is critical.However, should not those basic principles be in place day to day andshould they not include HR?
As an example of the immense pressures, just consider the comments
made about the corporate ﬁnance advisers Lazard in 2004. John Gapper in
theFinancial Times wrote about the chairman Michael David-Weill’s views
about the people at the top: ‘Any investment bank is by necessity full ofpeople who are pretty highly strung because the talent needed to win cus-tomers is made up in equal parts of conﬁdence in yourself and insecurity.’
2
Gapper went on to observe, ‘Investment bankers are very hard to manage– they are as egotistical as actors, with the complication that they measuresuccess in money rather than in applause.’ Given the mobility, earnings,ambitions and conﬁdence among talented people in a far wider range ofareas than corporate ﬁnance, HR needs to be up there at the side of thechairman and the chief executive to inﬂuence the outcome.
To deserve this role a good HR person needs business as well as per-
sonnel experience, courage, conﬁdence, excellent personal communicationskills, humanity and diplomacy. Yet I suspect most HR people did not38 The Rationale for Change

39
choose this ﬁeld because it might, if successful, lead to general manage-
ment. While few in marketing, ﬁnance, legal or operations actually getto the top, it is from these disciplines that to date the most senior man-agers tend to emerge. Given the importance of people management thereis a case for a new breed of senior adviser on strategic as well as oper-ational people matters who matches these traditional sources of seniorpeople in terms of character and ambition.
SHL, the developers, producers and trainers in psychometric tests,
conducted some work in the mid-1990s which their then managing
director Gill Nyﬁeld kindly shared with me. I asked the question ‘Howdo the psychometrics of HR executives compare with those of other man-agement disciplines?’ Gill provided the following characteristics:
HR people are more: HR people are less:
•afﬁliative •persuasive
•democratic •data rational
•caring •innovative
•behavioural •organised and structured
•worrying •critical
•competitive
The left-hand column contains some admirable attributes, but to carry
greater inﬂuence with the top team they may need to add some of thequalities on the right.
Do the leaders of the HR community accept these views and what
action do they believe is necessary?
Additionally, the historic work priorities of HR have not being
conducive to playing a strategic role. The day-to-day administration of
recruitment, training, employment legal processes, disputes, industrialtribunals, employee relations and assessment of competitive pay struc-tures all have a high level of administrative requirement. Given most linemanagers’ view that this is what HR is for, it is hard for many to breakout into a leading role in organisational development, M&A and the lead-ership of cultural change. Sometimes I feel that people moving into thesebig ticket areas can risk having the rug pulled from under them whensomething goes wrong in the administrative heartland. Wounding verbatims like ‘what are you doing on this cultural stuff when you can’teven get the payroll right?’ indicate the threat.The People Management Challenge

Bob Baumann, previous chairman of SmithKline Beecham, now GSK,
spoke a few years ago to the HR body, Devonshire House, with some
powerful advice on these lines.
Your role is to guide strategic and cultural aspects of the business so
that it attracts, retains and motivates the people you need to succeed. You cannot do that if you are primarily responsible for the administrativeprocesses of HR.
These issues are well known to the CIPD. They have a difﬁcult path
to tread given that the majority of the members and those who attend the major conferences they run, and who read their leading tradepublication People Management , are not in fact involved day-to-day in
the major organisational change issues. They need a trade body that servesand educates them on their day jobs, not something which, while interesting, and sometimes inspiring, does not have any practical beneﬁt for them. In the last year the CIPD has, I think bravely, startedto address this issue by commissioning people like the writer RichardDonkin (a regular freelance contributor to the FT) to assess the role of
HR in change.
Here are some of the main themes of the paper published in June
2004.
3
Donkin argued that the vital HR agenda in organisational change is
often sidelined, leaving HR professionals to pick up the pieces and addressthe resulting problems after the event. In general, HR people do not leadthese programmes, as Bob Baumann said, and have trouble freeing them-selves from their day-to-day operational and administrative activities.Donkin states that HR professionals need to move more effectively awayfrom the time they currently spend on administration and pay at least asmuch attention to the high-level ‘change agent role’.
The CIPD is not alone in questioning the HR role and endeavouring
to ensure that it is equipped to deal effectively with the many issues we have highlighted. For a start there are thriving subscription bodieslike the Corporate Development Council in the US and the CorporateResearch Forum in the UK created by the ex-Hewlett-Packard HR execu-tive Mike Haffenden, with Andrew Lambert and me as cofounders. Bothof these long-established groups pull no punches when it comes to the40 The Rationale for Change

41
need for change in HR. The Corporate Research Forum has worked closely
with leading academics in the ﬁeld, such as Ed Lawler, Jay Conger andthe late Sumatra Ghoshal among others. Their high-level contributionneeds a powerful, not just a respectful, audience. It is telling that theseacademics aim their own consulting work at chairmen and CEOs, whereasmarketing academics such as Tim Ambler can cut the mustard with Mar-keting Directors.
Ultimately, we believe that the reputation of HR itself is going to have
to change if people of sufﬁcient calibre to eventually achieve a truly senior
line job are going to be attracted to spend meaningful time there and beseen as a specialist in the area. HR must be an effective springboard forthe top. It is a subject that needs early study to establish the attitudes ofthose with the requisite character and ability but who have not, so far,considered the HR ﬁeld. Why have they not done this? What would haveto happen within HR to attract them?
One key role within the HR area that is capable of being used as a
strategic and political driver of change is the role of employee research.Historically, however, the employee research category is a poor relationwithin market research overall. Using the Association of Market SurveyOrganisations’ own estimates, only 0.5% of an expenditure of £380million (a modest £2 million or so) went on HR-related work. Given thefact that there are 27 million people at work in the UK and 40 millionadult consumers, we are spending £140 per adult head ﬁnding out theiropinions on breakfast cereals or motor cars, and only pennies per head onthe complex issues associated with their work. If we add the consultingindustries HR involvement (which includes considerable qualitativeresearch) we can improve these ﬁgures somewhat but we must concludethat many managers believe that they already know their people sufﬁ-ciently well and do not need further help.
As to what well-judged employee research can do, it is worth men-
tioning the work done among the 60,000 partners of John Lewis, the UKretail group responsible for John Lewis Department Stores and grocerychain Waitrose. Since the establishment of the John Lewis Partnership in1929 the group has pioneered the concept of partnership and the involve-ment of all workers as co-owners. In 2001, they decided to add to theirchannels of employee listening. They created a regular employee researchThe People Management Challenge

programme and, with advice from PiB, have created an ongoing process
involving a range of branches every month. The response rate has risenfrom 50% to 87% and the results are now being used in driving manymanagement decisions, at branch, division and partnership level. As theChairman, Sir Stuart Hampson, recently commented in their in-housemagazine
4:
I welcome the fact that the Survey has so swiftly become a well established
part of our arrangements and that it has opened up such constructive dia-logues between managers and their teams to increase the sense of fulﬁl-ment, involvement and fun in our business – and, of course, we know that
this makes us more commercially successful too.
Overall, we believe that the task of employer brand management will
attract a wider range of capable people than HR may have done in thepast. You cannot establish a consumer brand without senior managementstrategic involvement. The same goes for the employer brand. It em-bodies research, communications, high-level objectives, strategic devel-opment and the ability to implement and measure.
Good brand management is not a fad; it is a permanent and enduring
approach to good practice in this area. I experienced a graphic example
of the power of this approach when working on my ﬁrst brand, Smith’sCrisps. In the early 1960s, Smith’s Crisps was an independent companydominated by a managing director called C.J. Scott who had, I recall,married a descendant of the founder, Frank Smith. I say ‘dominated’because CJ took all the decisions and was in fact a great client of the W .S. Crawford ad agency in which I was a graduate trainee. We made anotable commercial directed by Dick Lester just after he had directed theBeatles’ ﬁlm ‘A Hard Days Night’, and our ﬁlm had the added bonus offeaturing Pattie Boyd, George Harrison’s girlfriend. How did brand man-agement work at Smith’s? The answer was that CJ was quite an effectiveholder of the role in addition to being managing director. He also had asales director, a market research manager, sales promotion and advertis-ing managers and a national accounts manager. These were experiencedpeople who were there after long careers with advertising agencies andresearch companies, but they largely did what they were told. There was little long-term planning and coordination and when, perhaps pre-dictably, Smith’s was sold to a classically marketing driven ﬁrm, most of42 The Rationale for Change

43
those people lost their jobs when a comprehensive marketing approach
was adopted.
I ﬁnish the chapter with that story because I can see the same thing
happening within the world of people management. The individual
experts will still have their place but it will be within the context ofemployer brand management, namely with one approved plan, one set ofpriorities and rigorous measurement.The People Management Challenge

The Role of Leadership 5
In the ﬁrst few years of my consulting in the early 1990s – perhaps when
we were assessing the effectiveness of internal communications, doingqualitative employee research or advising on post merger integration –dialogue like this sometimes emerged:
‘You’ll never get anywhere with this job you know.’‘Why not?’‘Because until the people at the top here are committed to change this
project is a waste of time.’
Have you ever felt like that? I can tell you far too many people do and ittakes me into this chapter on the importance of senior management’s lead-ership of the development and support for the employer brand. If you areworking in a politically sensitive area where roles, responsibility andpower are key factors, then you have to get buy-in from the top. And notjust buy-in. Any new capital investment like plant and machinery has toget buy-in from the top. Strengthening the employer brand needs morethan that, it needs leadership involvement, commitment and courage toovercome the forces of conservatism which can result in an employerbrand project being still-born or restricted to tinkering with a differentstyle of recruitment advertising.
We recently did an analysis of the last ﬁve years of People in Business’s
work. You would think that HR were the major buyers but, for many of the reasons we covered in Chapter 4, they are not. Of our revenue overthe past ﬁve years, 57% has come from working with CEOs and Managing Directors, 28% from HR and 15% from corporate affairs/internal communications and similar functions.
Employer Brand Management needs active senior leadership because it
can mean rocking the status quo, breaking down silos, establishing new

roles and relationships, new approaches to measurement and answering
difﬁcult questions on what the organisation stands for, and why? Whatare the behaviours that these values should drive? What is the correctbalance of power between the Group and any one of its subsidiaries? Theanswers to these questions must be teased out from the top and made partof the fabric so that one poor quarter’s results or a high-level resignation,or any of the other slings and arrows that regularly beset large organisa-tions, does not succeed in bowling the project over.
I learned the real power of the board in my Colgate days. I remember
Reuben Mark (now Chairman) telling brand managers: ‘Forget the idea
that the brand manager is the managing director of his/her brand. Yourjob is to know more about your brand in your market than anyone elseworld wide. Given that knowledge you will be listened to but the powercomes from the top.’ The brand groups were charged with recommend-ing the plan, covering every aspect of the business, be it formula, pack-aging, media, creative proposition, distribution, promotion or anythingelse. However, once that plan was agreed in a formidable budget sessionwith European and Global Management, it became the company’s plannot just yours. That was what gave a brand manager the inﬂuence andcontrol necessary to ensure delivery through much more senior peoplewith real line authority. It occurs to me that one of HR’s issues is thatthe equivalent of a signed off programme is often lacking so that initia-tives have to be constantly sold and resold down the line.
In the majority of successful employer brand programmes we encoun-
tered during our research, the CEO played a visible and active role inboth development and communication. Of the six work streams makingup Reuters’ Fast Forward programme, the CEO Tom Glocer chose to takea direct role in leading ‘Living Fast’, the culture change dimension of theprogramme that sought to redeﬁne what Reuters would come to mean toits employees (the employer brand). At Nationwide, the CEO, PhilipWilliamson, made it clear from the beginning of their PRIDE values pro-gramme (now in its third year) that these values would play a central rolein deﬁning his approach to leading the organisation. As Tom Harvey,Nationwide’s head of internal communication, commented: ‘While HRhave played a signiﬁcant role in embedding these values, it was clearlyPhilip’s long-term vision and commitment to PRIDE that has encour-aged both the slow adopters as well as the early adopters to get on board.’46 The Rationale for Change

47
Sir Terry Leahy has played a similar role at Tesco, as has Michael Bailey
at Compass.
Another feature that unites most of these examples is the deep knowl-
edge that each of the CEOs has of the organisation. All of those men-
tioned above were promoted from within, having managed different partsof the business before becoming CEO. They also share what many havedescribed as the ‘common touch’. These are leaders who know what it islike at the ‘sharp end’ of their business and have not forgotten their roots.As Terry Leahy, who worked his way up through the Tesco ranks fromstore management, has commented: ‘I had a good advantage to grow upin the business. I know how it ticks and was well prepared for my role[as CEO].’
1Michael Bailey at Compass Group began his career as a chef,
and it was clear from our research that his promotion of the Compassemployer brand was informed by a deep afﬁnity with his front line staff.Both Tom Glocer of Reuters and Philip Williamson of Nationwide weredescribed as having made important interventions during the process ofdeveloping values statements to ensure that they remained simple, engag-ing and not too over-engineered.
While there are many positive reasons for leaders to take a keen inter-
est in developing and managing the employer brand, there is also agrowing negative inﬂuence that it can help them to counter. Branding ishighly relevant because it shares the same cornerstone as leadership. Flair,style and charisma (like creative advertising) have their place, but the cor-nerstone of effective leadership is trust. In this respect, many corporateleadership teams appear to be suffering from major subsidence. Accord-ing to a study by Mercer ( What’s Working ) in the UK, only 40% of
employees trust their senior management team to communicate withthem honestly.
2Among the UK public at large the picture is even bleaker.
In 2003, a poll conducted by MORI for the FTfound that 80% of people
disagreed that ‘directors of large companies can be trusted to tell thetruth’.
3This was corroborated by two further surveys conducted the same
year. The British Medical Association’s annual ‘veracity test’ found thatonly a quarter of people trusted business leaders to tell the truth.
4A
further MORI poll conducted among 13 to 18 year olds as part of the
Nestlé Family Monitor found only 16% of young people believed business
leaders could be trusted to tell the truth.5This ranked business leaders
even lower than government ministers (now that isalarming!).The Role of Leadership

I’m sure I need not dwell on the many reasons why trust appears to be
in such short supply. Enron, ‘fat cats’, ﬁnancial underperformance,
retrenchment on pensions, an increase in redundancies and the resurgenceof Union militancy have all played their part in undermining trust inbusiness leadership.
Establishing trust is particularly important for the newly appointed
CEO. As soon as a CEO takes up a new position, he or she is on borrowed
time. Much like a new brand launch, there is generally a fanfare, but thereis also a signiﬁcant element of ‘wait and see’. The ﬁrst 100 days repre-sent the critical period during which initial expectations are tested, sub-stance is weighed, new relationships are established and change is set inmotion. They say that people get judged in an interview situation withinthe ﬁrst ﬁve minutes. New CEO’s may get a little longer to make animpression, but not much longer.
While in some cases the CEOs can be regarded as ‘brands’ that
arrive with high-proﬁle reputations that need to be honed and nurtured,
there is much in this perspective that smacks of personal vanity, and it is not the angle that I suggest we focus on. More importantly, new CEOs take on a role at the helm of the corporate brand and it is theirpotential (and ability) to exert inﬂuence over the shape, direction andmomentum of this brand that makes up a signiﬁcant proportion of the‘wait and see’.
Corporate brands are complex entities, with a diverse range of stake-
holders. During the ﬁrst few months, it is sometimes tempting for the
CEO to focus most attention on shaping the perceptions of the ﬁnancialcommunity. The support of investors clearly remains essential, but Iwould like to focus on another brand relationship which is often just ascritical in establishing the trust required to set an organisation on a newcourse: the employer brand.
With the advent of a new CEO, people within a company generally
expect change, and for a few months the CEO has the opportunity to re-vitalise not only the company’s investment rating, but people’s percep-tions of the company they work for.
So what is there in the brand toolkit that can help the CEO? I would
like to suggest six core principles of effective brand management (thatwe will explore in greater detail in Part II of the book) that could helpthe CEO through the ﬁrst 100 days.48 The Rationale for Change

49
1.Insight – Great brands are founded on a deep understanding of
the relationship between the brand and its audience. How do
employees currently perceive the employer brand? Do people have astrong sense of the organisation’s purpose and values (both implicitand explicit)? Is there a consistent core of opinion shared by allemployees? What behaviours are felt to be most characteristic of theorganisation? What currently drives people’s commitment and whatdemoralises people? Why do people choose to join the organisationand why do they leave? (This may be a critical question if the CEOneeds to rebuild the management team.) If your employees are askedto describe the kind of organisation they work for, how are they likelyto reply?
2.Focus – One of the most important roles of branding is to provide a
focal point for people’s relationship with a product or service. Thesame holds true for people’s relationship with the organisation theywork for. The focal point for most effective employer brands tends tobe either what the organisation does, or plans to do (the vision,purpose, goals, value-added to customers and consumers) or how theydo it (the values, style, culture and personality of the organisation).To make an impact the CEO needs to recognise the current focalpoint, and if the desire is to drive change, then make the new focalpoint crystal clear.
3.Differentiation – Successful brands constantly need to differentiate
themselves. From an employer brand perspective, what is it about the
organisation that makes it different from or better than its nearestcompetitors? If, as a new CEO, you plan to set a new course for theorganisation, how will this be different from or better than what hasgone before? This may be clear to you, but you need to make it under-standable to everyone else.
4.Beneﬁts – Effective brand management focuses on beneﬁts not
features. This may be a marketing cliché, but this maxim is oftenoverlooked when it comes to internal communication. Simply stated,if you’re going to make changes, what’s in it for the employees? The answer is seldom more money or greater security, but it could bea greater share in success, competitive strength or wider career oppor-tunities. Don’t just assume that employees will read this between thelines.The Role of Leadership

5.Continuity – People lose trust in brands that try to make sudden
U-turns. A new CEO needs to understand that for everyone else you
are a chapter in an unfolding story, not the beginning of the story.However troubled the present situation, you should recognise thestrengths of what has gone before, and stress continuity where you areable. People are far more accepting of change if they can see where ithas come from, not just where it is going.
6.Consistency – When building trust, consistency is by far the most
critical factor. Does what people are hearing have a logical consis-
tency? Even more importantly, is communication consistent withmanagement behaviour, and the concrete changes that employees maybe beginning to experience within the organisation? If businessleaders followed just one simple brand maxim it would be that prom-
ises need to be matched by clear reasons to believe .
Let us study a few speciﬁc examples of leadership and its impact on theemployment experience.
Robert Hiscox is Chairman of the insurance group Hiscox, based in
Great St Helens in the City. Originally a family company, now a plc and
with Hiscox’s own equity now modest, the revenue has grown from £3million when he took over the management in 1970 to £1 billion in2004. However, it is not the growth that makes this an interesting storyfrom an employer brand point of view. There is clarity on behaviour; andthere is clarity on delegation, often with immense decision-making powergiven to capable people. Some of the more experienced underwriters cantake on up to £25 million of risk without sign-off. There is clarity onwho does what at the top, what Hiscox himself does and what his ex-McKinsey Chief Executive Bronek Masojada does. Above all there is anunderlying conﬁdence in the leadership that makes it possible for themto admit uncertainty and own up to error. It is an unforgiving place andthey do not easily forgive themselves. Finally, that conﬁdence also drives,in my opinion, the humour, humanity and directness in which Hiscoxpeople go about their business together.
Maybe a business with a powerful legacy provides the bedrock of that
conﬁdence. I heard the Chief Executive of Timberland, Jeff Schwartz,
speak at a Tomorrow’s Company event in January 2005, He talked abouthis grandfather, a Russian immigrant cobbler who arrived in Boston early50 The Rationale for Change

51
in the twentieth century and the principles that he felt still drive the con-
tinuing success of the modern Timberland business. Now, you may feelthat the conﬁdence of men like Hiscox and Schwartz comes from a legacyof ﬁnancial comfort rather than a legacy of standards, culture, values andbehaviour. While there are many cases of family management ruining ﬁnebusinesses, i.e. clogs to clogs in three generations, I think that there aremore powerful drivers than money in the way such leaders as these work.As Professor Schumpeter of Harvard once memorably said, ‘Capitalismis not a matter of counting coins. Capitalism is a romance and an adven-ture’, and there has to be an element of that magic in any employer brand. The more a leader feels like that the more powerful their employer brandwill be.
I should mention one other great business that is still privately owned.
I was the account director on Chanel in my advertising days and workedfor Alain Wertheimer when he took over the business, aged 29. The wayhe has run Chanel reminds me of the quote ‘live each day as if it is yourlast and farm your land as if you are going to live for ever’. In the extraor-dinarily competitive, ephemeral world of fragrance, beauty and fashionthere is, again, conﬁdence, courage and certainty in the basics that hasprovided a springboard for idea after idea, whether it is the hiring of KarlLagerfeld in 1986 or the use of Nicole Kidman in Baz Luhrman’s ChanelNo. 5 commercial in November 2004, reputedly, minute for minute themost expensive ﬁlm in history. Throughout the fragrances, the cosmeticsand the fashion, there is a creative and design surefootedness that instinc-tively expresses the essence of Chanel. It was there in the CatherineDeneuve advertisements in the 1960s, in the designs and in the behav-iours of the executives, many of whom – like Jacques Helleu, who isresponsible for Chanel’s creative in Paris or Michael Rena the ‘con-siglione’ in New York – have years of service. Yet Wertheimer is not apublic leader. He never gives interviews and his legacy will be that Chaneland its employer brand will remain respected at the very top of themarket.
I have mentioned three leaders with strong family business roots. Their
employer brand leadership stems from a commitment and a longevity of
which any business leader should be capable. Someone who has dem-onstrated both is Sir Martin Sorrell, Chief Executive of WPP . He runswhat we believe is one of the most complex employer brands on earth:The Role of Leadership

84,000 people, over 100 separate companies, built on a philosophy of
operational and creative freedom with sharp ﬁnancial controls. His lead-ership goes back to 1985, since when the WPP share price has risen fromabout 27p to around 600p. Over that period he has steadfastly expandedthe range of his business and recovered from three crippling share pricereverses in 1988, 1991 and 2000. What makes the WPP employer brandso noteworthy is that, on paper at least, his strategy of devolvement andempowerment should place that responsibility into the hands of theleaders of his many businesses, each with a character, identity and pos-itioning of its own. Managing creative businesses can be a nightmare, andthat is without asking them to work together. I suspect Sorrell has a veryshrewd eye in assessing the correct balance between salaried leadershipand unmanageable entrepreneurs. He must have, because I cannot thinkof any truly damaging breakaway on the lines of Frank Lowe’s start-upof Lowe Howard Spink and the industry paper Campaign’s headline‘Lowe rips £22 million out of Colletts’ (the agency Collett Dickinson andPearce). Martin Sorrell has judged his leaders just a whisker away fromJ.K. Galbraith’s observation that ‘a man works for another when hebelieves that that man could do better for him than he could do forhimself’.
6
Today, that risk is lessened because of the complexity and international
nature of many agency–client relationships. Indeed the WPP employer
brand is, almost in spite of itself, being put onto centre stage because ofthe opportunity for global deals where such clients as Vodafone, Ford,Astra Zeneca, HSBC and Samsung have bought a joined up approach withthe responsibility for managing it across the tribes of WPP being theresponsibility of WPP itself. Clients may see the good sense in terms ofmarketing coherence and, no doubt, cost saving, but getting talentedindependent people, albeit in one group, to work together means that theemployer brand of WPP is becoming more important. As Sorrell said inour interview with him for this book, ‘Turf, territory and ego are biggerissues at the top of the tribes than at the bottom.’ However, the WPPemployer brand has some powerful glue. First of all is his realisation thatthe biggest investment the company makes is in its people. He believesthat the $6 billion they spend on people per year can be regarded as aninvestment rather than a cost, and making the most of this should takemuch more time and energy than that historically being focused on52 The Rationale for Change

53
capital expenditure per year, some $300 million in WPP’s case. That
thinking has led to a Group-wide incentive scheme, a Marketing Fel-lowship programme unmatched to date by any of the other major mar-keting services groups, and demanding expectations of the leaders of hisbusinesses not just in ﬁnancial terms but in their behaviours. Any mar-keting services group chief executive who says ‘the great managing direc-tors and CEOs make it their business to breakfast, lunch and network thebest people in the business all the time’ must be worth staying with.Finally, WPP’s glue also includes original thought on the marketing services business itself which, for 17 years, has been led by Jeremy Bullmore, a previous chairman of J. Walter Thompson, whose insights,writing and public speaking have long commanded the respect of hisindustry. All in all, Martin Sorrell’s WPP employer brand is a difﬁcultone to leave. It will also be difﬁcult for anyone else to take on the torchof leading it.
For employer brand builders, getting the boss’s active enthusiasm and
support is critical. The real thing cannot be built without it. Don’t start
until you have it.The Role of Leadership

Part II
The ‘How To’ Guide
Richard Mosley

Brand Fundamentals 6
Until the late twentieth century most people would have only associated
the term ‘brand’ with consumer goods and services. The term is now usedfar more widely and it is commonplace for the term ‘brand’ to be used todescribe virtually anything carrying a distinct identity, and the reputa-tion, good or bad, associated with that identity. Branding has become thesnake oil of modern management. If you believe the brand pundits,branding will cure all ills. It will secure customer loyalty, drive growth,increase proﬁts, induce undying employee commitment to the company’scause, ward off the evil eye of critical investment analysts, reverse nationaldecline, win elections and ﬁll an otherwise drab, mundane and irreligiousworld with new hope and meaning. Branding has ﬁlled every nook andcranny. Self-help gurus have even begun to recommend that people shouldstart thinking of themselves as brands and manage their careers and livesaccordingly. The popular media is crammed full of celebrities busily pro-moting their personal brand image to maintain their place in the light.There is even a ‘stock market’ where you can track the rise and fall of acelebrity’s brand value. People have become justiﬁably cynical about‘branding’, but when you strip away the over-claims, the ﬂim-ﬂam, glossand spin that often accompany the branding bandwagon, the fundamen-tals of brand development and management remain extremely valuable.
In the following chapters we will attempt to demonstrate how these
fundamentals can be applied to developing and managing the employerbrand, but ﬁrst we would like to deﬁne our terms of reference. A vastnumber of books have been devoted to the general subject of brands andmarketing, but even the most common terms, such as ‘the brand promise’,‘brand proposition’ and ‘brand positioning’, are seldom described inexactly the same way. Before moving on to the task of applying general

brand theory to employer brand practice, we will attempt to present a
simple guide to the critical components.
FUNCTIONAL BENEFITS
At its simplest, a brand is no more than a badge of identity and promiseof performance. It tells you where something (or someone) is from, andit carries an implied guarantee that what has been promised on behalf ofthe brand will be delivered. Gillette will shave you closer. Persil will washwhiter. Ronseal will do what it says it will do on the back of the can.Even where brands promise something more intangible – style, knowl-edge, ﬁnancial security – this tends to be underpinned by some form oftangible functionality. Fashion brands wouldn’t survive for long if theirclothes fell apart. Information services need to be provided in an access-ible format. Insurance companies need to be able to provide you withhard currency if a ﬁnancial drama turns into a cash crisis.
Employer brands are also founded on a number of basic functional ben-
eﬁts and performance guarantees, such as payment for services rendered,
a safe working environment, the provision of the equipment necessary tocarry out your roles and responsibilities. These beneﬁts may be implic-itly taken for granted, or they may be important elements within youremployer brand proposition – top quartile pay, a highly attractiveworking environment, cutting edge technology.
EMOTIONAL BENEFITS
Brands take tangible form in the functional beneﬁts that they deliver, butthey also tend to deliver value in other more subtle and complex ways. I was recently involved in running a series of workshops for Unileverexploring the practical implications of their code of business principles.The section of their code covering consumers included the statement:‘Products and services will be accurately and properly labelled, advertisedand communicated.’
1In the 30 or so workshops that I facilitated for them
around Europe, I knew that I was almost guaranteed to raise a laugh if I
made the following observation. The advertising for one of their leadingdeodorant brands strongly implied that it would make me irresistible towomen. However, despite my regular use of the product, women didn’t58 The ‘How To’ Guide

59
appear to be falling over themselves to make my acquaintance. How could
this be? Had I missed the small print excluding the less than perfectlyattractive? The question to the audience: ‘Is this accurate communica-tion?’ The strictly ‘accurate’ answer in terms of ‘exact conformit y… with
truth’ ( Concise Oxford English Dictionary ) would be ‘no’.
2But, of course, no
one regards this as deception. Communication of this kind is seldom soblack and white. The promise of irresistibility is acceptable in this case,because it is only implied not stated, and it comes wrapped in irony. Theintended result is that not only will people believe the functional promisethat this brand will be an efﬁcacious deodorant, but that the brand willbe associated (on a more emotive level) with the tongue-in-cheek self-conﬁdence and sexual appeal to which the target audience aspires. Inshort, it will promote a relevant and attractive emotional beneﬁt thatserves to ‘position’ the more functional beneﬁts of the product in the mindof the consumer. In a similar fashion, most brands have shifted their mainfocus away from what the brand does (easy to copy) to how it will makeyou feel (easier to differentiate).
Emotional engagement is currently a hot topic in the world of work,
and the psychological beneﬁts associated with employer brands are just
as important as they are to branded products and services. It has longbeen recognised that there is more to motivation than pay, incentives orcoercion, the ‘kick in the ass’ approach to motivation debunked long agoby Herzberg.
3People’s emotional attachment to their employer tends to
be driven by the value they derive from the total work experience, includ-ing the inherent satisfaction they derive from the tasks they perform, theextent to which they feel valued by their colleagues, and their belief inthe quality, purpose and values of the organisation they represent. Howthis ‘psychological contract’ is communicated and delivered forms anessential counterpart to the more tangible functional ‘terms and con-ditions’ incorporated in the formal employment contract.
HIGHER ORDER BENEFITS, BRAND VALUES AND DNA
As brands are extended across a range of different products and servicesthe promises made on their behalf tend to migrate to higher ground.Charles Revlon famously claimed that while other companies sold cos-metics, Revlon sold hope. Similarly, the deodorant Lynx had shifted theBrand Fundamentals

core focus for the brand away from the speciﬁc functionality of deodoris-
ing towards male attractiveness. These higher order beneﬁts – conﬁdence,freedom, well-being, refreshment – are often described in terms of brandvalues or in a more distilled form, the DNA or essence of the brand. Theytend to be the primary focus of brand communication and image-building, with the more speciﬁc functional performance of individualproducts and services providing the tangible ‘reasons to believe’.
When these image associations are strong they can also enhance
people’s physical experience of the branded product. In tests, people typ-
ically give identical products higher performance scores when they arebranded than when they are unbranded. People’s headaches clear up fasterwhen they know the brand name. Likewise, Coca-Cola tastes more refresh-ing when people know it is Coca-Cola.
The ground-breaking study Built to Last , written by Collins and Porras
in 1995, prompted a host of business leaders to set off in search of theircorporation’s inner purpose and values.
4These core attributes were
couched in very similar terms to the higher order values and beneﬁts usedto describe product and service brands, but these two streams have gen-erally failed to come together in a satisfactory union. In a holdingcompany one can understand the need to deﬁne a number of high-levelprinciples within which the total family of companies should operate, butwhen the brand deﬁnes both the organisation and its products and ser-vices, is there really room for two competing sets of values – one set forthe organisation, the other for the services it advertises externally. Itreminds me of the Groucho Marx line: ‘I have principles, and if you don’tlike them I have others.’ The purpose of the employer brand propositionis not to invent a further set of values, but to help to ensure that thepurpose and value statements that currently exist are translated intosomething relevant and meaningful to employees, and made consistentwith the values the organisation wishes to project externally.
BRAND PERSONALITY
While this range of functional, emotional and higher order beneﬁtsdescribes what the brand can do for you, the style, tone and range of ref-erences used to communicate these beneﬁts represent a further dimensionof branding, generally referred to as ‘brand personality’. Brand person-ality is a useful metaphor since, like brands, we tend to be attracted to60 The ‘How To’ Guide

61
people who display both individuality and reasonable predictability over
time. In forming a relationship, we like to know where we stand withpeople. The same is true of brands. Just as personality deﬁnes the pat-terns we seek (and come to expect) in our relationships with people, brandpersonality helps us to familiarise and identify (or not) with differentchoices of brand. The personality of some brands is largely deﬁned andrepresented by their founder. The personality traits of Virgin – enter-prising, irreverent, and fun – are largely felt to be personiﬁed by RichardBranson. Others pay large sums of money to be endorsed by celebritieswhose personalities they hope will become closely associated with thebrand. A classic example of this is Nike’s association with the basketballsuperstar Michael Jordan. A more recent example is Accenture’s associa-tion with Tiger Woods. The personality of most brands, however, is builtup in a more piecemeal fashion over time. The personality of brands thathave been around for many years – Pepsi, Guinness, Marlboro, Shell –tend to derived from a more complex mix of long-term heritage, oldadvertising campaigns, and most recent marketing activity. Where thesebrands have been managed well over time (which applies to most of thelong-term survivors) there always appears to be that underlying core ofconsistency and familiarity you would expect of an old friend.
‘Authenticity’ is a key word in the brand lexicon. The brand person-
ality of packaged products generally comes down to carefully constructed
communication. The personality of a service brand is far more difﬁcult tofabricate and control, since it tends to be deeply rooted in the culture ofthe organisation and the character and behaviour of the many differenttypes of people the organisation relies on to deliver its service to the cus-tomer. The employer brand probably represents the ultimate test inauthenticity, since it is virtually impossible to misrepresent the cultureand personality of an organisation to those people who experience it atﬁrst hand 40–60 hours a week. Deﬁning the employer brand personality,therefore, comes down to both an insightful reading of the currentculture, and people’s shared (and reasonably realistic) aspirations.
BRAND POSITIONING AND DIFFERENTIATION
The beneﬁts, values and personality traits described above can only meansomething if they are deﬁned in relation to a target audience that valueswhat is being offered. Every brand is surrounded by alternatives Brand Fundamentals

competing for their share of attention, interest and loyalty. Brands need
to be focused to compete effectively in this crowded space, and brandpositioning represents the art and science of targeting the right audienceswith the most compelling beneﬁts and brand messages.
To be compelling most brands need to emphasise what makes them
different and better at fulﬁlling the needs of this target group. This is a
tricky business since, as we have discussed, most functional beneﬁts aresoon copied. This means that in addition to delivering constant improve-ments to ensure that the functional performance of the product or serviceremains competitive, brands also need to develop and defend a positionin the marketplace that they can uniquely own. This is where the brandimage and personality plays a critical role in both anchoring the brand(what stays the same as the functionality changes), and differentiating thebrand in the mind of the consumer. Returning to the deodorant market,Lynx, Sure and Dove deodorants come in almost identical formats, andfunction equally effectively. However, Lynx is targeted at young men andfocuses on attractiveness, Dove is targeted at women and focuses on beinggentler on the skin, and the more unisex Sure focuses on keeping you dryeven in the sweatiest circumstances.
This distillation of the most relevant, differentiating and compelling
brand descriptors for a given target group is generally referred to as abrand proposition. You will note the use of ‘a’ not ‘the’ brand proposi-tion. This is because there may be both a ‘core’ brand proposition rele-vant to all audiences and a range of sub-propositions deﬁning the keybeneﬁt and message for more speciﬁc subgroups of the audience (includ-ing employees).
New brands tend to be positioned relatively narrowly in terms of both
target audience and beneﬁt. As brands become more mature and suc-
cessful they tend to extend their ‘footprint’ by offering different beneﬁtsto the same target group, or the same beneﬁts to different target groups.Gillette’s extension into female razors (with the sub-brand Venus) fromits strongly held position in premium priced, high-performance, dispos-able razors for men, is a classic example of the second of these approaches.The user group (gender, age, etc.) is only one of many potential ways todeﬁne and segment a market. You can also deﬁne your market positionby product type (disposable vs electric); price (premium Gillette vsbargain Bic); occasion (home vs away); distribution channel (supermarket62 The ‘How To’ Guide

63 Brand Fundamentals
vs vending machine). Positioning offers endlessly new permutations both
for brand leaders to extend their dominance and challenger brands to geta foothold.
The art of brand positioning is highly relevant to the employer brand
proposition in two very important respects. The ﬁrst and most obvious
of these is that employees represent an important target group for thebrand with distinctly different needs and aspirations from customers andconsumers. For the brand to be relevant and motivating to employees itneeds to be positioned to meet these needs and aspirations. It is also valuable to consider whether the proposition is clearly differentiated. What can the organisation offer its potential candidates and currentemployees that make it better or different from the other alternatives opento them? Once this is accepted as making good sense, the next logicalstep is to recognise that current employees and potential candidates foremployment are likely to be as diverse (if not more diverse) than thecompany’s customer base. In the war for talent, and the competition forcommitment, targeting the right audiences with the right brand mess-ages and beneﬁts is as critical for the employer brand as for the customerbrand.
BRAND HIERARCHY
You will note the introduction of sub-branding in the above example.The concept of brand hierarchy is used to deﬁne the relationships withina family of brands. At the product level Venus is unique in some respects(deﬁning a product range designed for women) while beneﬁting from (and reinforcing) some of the associations shared across the total Gillette range (particularly its ‘cutting edge’ credentials in shaving). As withbrand positioning, getting the brand hierarchy right involves a care-ful balancing act. In this case between maintaining the focus and cre-dentials of the ‘parent brand’, and the more tailored positioning of thesub-brand. Gillette probably chose to sub-brand Venus because ‘Gillettefor women’ may have felt too masculine. Nevertheless, Gillette’sendorsement of Venus gave it performance credentials it may have lackedgoing alone.
This balancing act becomes extremely relevant in the employer brand
context when you are trying to manage the relationship between a ‘parent’

corporate brand (e.g. Whitbread) and its separately branded operating
companies (e.g. Costa Coffee, Lloyd Leisure and Marriot hotels). To whatextent should employees identify with the corporate brand? What degreeof inﬂuence should the corporate owner try to exert over the employmentexperience of its company portfolio? These are some of the key employerbrand hierarchy questions that we will address in Chapter 9.
BRAND VISION AND BRAND REALITY
It is important for those tasked with developing and managing brands tospend quality time and effort deﬁning the key components of the brand.This deﬁnition is typically enshrined in an idealised model (the brandkey, diamond, pyramid, etc.). This model brand typically provides thestarting point for the brand strategy, with an emphasis on ﬁnding themost effective way of getting its message across to the target audience.The inherent danger in this approach is forgetting that the model youhave deﬁned is a vision of the brand as you would like people to see it,not the brand reality. The real brand lives not in the model, but in people’severyday experience of the brand and the rather more untidy cluster ofperceptions and associations that they carry around in their heads. Thereason this is important is that if brand communication strays too far fromthe perceived reality of the brand it can feel phoney or, worse, set upexpectations that fail to be delivered. People are understandably cynicalabout brands that promise much, but fail to live up to expectations,brands that are all show and no substance. These are the brands that givebranding a bad name. To counter this overemphasis on the idealised brandmany brand-led companies like Unilever insist on two deﬁnitions of thebrand, the ﬁrst describing the brand as it is currently perceived and expe-rienced, warts and all (the brand reality), and the second describing howthe company would like it to be perceived and experienced (the brandvision). To get to where you want to get to it helps to be very clear aboutwhere you currently are.
This gap between vision and reality is extremely pertinent to employer
brands. Corporate policy and value statements appear particularly prone
to aspirational over-claim. It is not only the expensive gloss of the paperthat makes employees feel that corporate literature is out of touch. It isalso the tendency of corporate communication to gloss over the everyday64 The ‘How To’ Guide

65
realities of the employment experience in their assertion of what the
company claims to stand for or offer its employees.
BRAND MANAGEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT
The task of most brand managers who inherit an existing brand is to closethe gap between the current brand reality and the brand vision. Thisrequires them to steer a course between what may initially appear to be twocontradictory goals. The ﬁrst goal is to maintain the clarity, consistency andcontinuity of the brand. The second goal is to introduce changes that willhelp to develop, stretch and refresh the brand. Striking the right balancebetween these two tasks is a constant challenge. Change too much and thebrand will lose focus; change too little and the brand will lose relevance.
Brand Consistency and Continuity
At the most fundamental level brands need to present a clear and con-sistent visual identity. Brands are usually governed by strict identityguidelines that determine how the brand logo should appear, whichcolours and fonts should be used in association with the brand and eventhe type of imagery that should be used. One of the basic roles of brandmanagement is to ensure that these guidelines are being followed. Giventhe tendency of people within large and relatively disparate organisationsto ‘do their own thing’, corporate brand identity generally requires con-stant policing to keep it on track.
The second and more difﬁcult task is to ensure that everything the
company communicates about the brand remains clear and consistent.
There is now a bewilderingly wide range of potential channels for brandcommunication. Ensuring that your packaging, advertising, direct mail,point of sale materials, sponsorships and other assorted media combineto reinforce the same key brand messages and associations, represents ahuge challenge to brand managers, particularly when the ‘creative’ workfor these channels is handled by a number of different agencies. Ensur-ing a strong degree of continuity over time is also a major challenge whenthere is constant temptation to try something new. Many brands havefallen by the wayside having switched and changed tack numerous timesto attract short-term attention, while some of the most successful haveBrand Fundamentals

been relentlessly consistent over time in reinforcing the same core brand
proposition. The premium lager Stella Artois is a classic example of abrand that has grown year on year for the last decade by sticking con-sistently to the same “reassuringly expensive” message.
While less of an issue for packaged goods, the third and most difﬁcult
task for service brands is to deliver a brand experience that consistently
delivers on the underlying proposition. While there are typically anumber of functional components within a service offering that can giveyour brand an edge, the most important factor in shaping perceptions ofa service brand tends to be your people. This represents a step change inmanaging the brand experience which many service companies are stillstruggling to come to terms. It also represents a critical issue in em-ployer brand management. As Dr Graeme Martin and Professor PhillipBeaumont
5state in their excellent review of the relationship between
branding and people management: ‘It is widely recognised that satisfac-
tion with service brands is intimately related to the expected and per-ceived behaviour of employees, which is often the most difﬁcult factor tocontrol in the marketing mix. However, this [marketing] literature isrooted in the belief that communications are the main source and solu-tion for all organisational problems. It tends to restrict the role of HR tocommunicating brand values, rather than being the source of such valuesand the driver of key aspects of strategy.’
In turning our attention to managing employee’s perceptions and ex-
perience of the employer brand it is surprising how many organisations
seem to disregard even the most basic rules of external brand manage-ment. Even when the presentation of the main corporate logo is rigor-ously policed it is common within many organisations to ﬁnd hundredsof internal sub-identities promoting different regions, divisions, depart-ments, internal channels, change programmes and policy initiatives. Thelack of basic brand discipline becomes equally evident when you considerinternal communication. It is fairly typical for multiple sources withinan organisation to be pumping out communication with little regard toa common agenda, and the roll-call of corporate campaigns seldom dis-plays any continuity over time. The latest big message is always the mostimportant, until it is superseded and contradicted by the next bigmessage. Putting all of these sub-identities and campaign initiatives onone page (if they will ﬁt) is an exercise that soon reveals why employees66 The ‘How To’ Guide

67 Brand Fundamentals
often feel overburdened and confused by organisational complexity. As
Linda Gratton6so eloquently puts it:
In the rush to change there is an overwhelming desire to start again, to deny
the past, to continuously look for the new formulae – consistency and con-tinuity are destroyed. Employees are the victims of a stream of new initia-tives and management despair when the quick ﬁx fails to materialize.
If employees were treated with the same care and respect as customers,
this kind of inconsistency and confusion would never be tolerated.
Brand Development
While a strong degree of consistency and continuity are imperative formaintaining the integrity and credibility of a brand, brands can neverafford to stand still. People’s needs, aspirations and tastes change overtime. Competing brands will forever be striving to offer new and betteralternatives. Against this evolving background brand managers con-stantly need to refresh the way in which the brand is communicated anddelivered. Products and services need to be constantly improved andupgraded. Think of the way in which the VW Golf has evolved over time,or Microsoft Windows. Brand communication requires constant creativeattention to ﬁnd new ways of dramatising brand messages. Brand man-agers also need to explore new avenues for stretching and growing thebrand by extending the product range, targeting new audiences or takingthe brand into new geographical territory. Brands are either growing ordying. There is no middle ground.
One of the most difﬁcult issues facing internal brand programmes is
the question of maintaining momentum. From our perspective this is
because the agenda for ongoing development tends to be weak. All thefocus tends to be on the launch, getting the message across, making animpact, after which the agenda switches to bedding in and maintenance.Ongoing brand management needs to be about more than policing.Employees needs and aspirations also change. To grow and ﬂourish,employer brands need constant renewal and refreshment.
Brand management has been successfully applied to building brand
reputation and winning the commitment and loyalty of customers for over 70 years. As many companies are beginning to realise, the

‘joined-up’ discipline of brand management can equally be applied to
attracting, retaining and engaging your most valued employees (fromyour top ‘strategic’ talent to your frontline ‘brand ambassadors’). As wehope to demonstrate, there is far more to employer branding than ‘sexingup’ your recruitment materials or running a ‘living the brand’ internal communications campaign. The following chapters provide a practicalstep-by-step guide to developing and implementing an employer brandstrategy that not only delivers on your immediate business objectives, butalso helps to ensure that your brand is built to last.
SUMMARY
1. While the use of branding for superﬁcial image manipulation has
resulted in a degree of cynicism, the fundamental disciplines of brandmanagement remain extremely valuable.
2. Strong brands offer clearly deﬁned functional and emotional beneﬁts.
3. They are characterised by enduring values and personality traits.4. They are clearly positioned in the minds of their target audiences and
differentiated from their competitors.
5. The parent and subsidiary relationships within the brand family are
clearly deﬁned and mutually supportive.
6. They retain a solid core of consistency while constantly developing
fresh avenues for expressing and delivering value.68 The ‘How To’ Guide

The Business Case 7
The ﬁrst question you’ll need to address before developing an employer
brand plan is: How can a stronger employer brand help the organisationto achieve its objectives? This chapter will attempt to provide somegeneral answers to this question relating to goals that are common tomost organisations. These include lowering costs, increasing customersatisfaction and, ultimately, delivering higher than average return oninvestment and proﬁtability. We will also try to provide some more spe-ciﬁc answers relating to organisational life stages and ‘rites of passage’.
THE MAJOR BENEFITS OF EMPLOYER BRANDING
The three major beneﬁts of employer branding identiﬁed in research con-ducted by Hewitt Associates,
1The Conference Board2andThe Economist3
are generally cited as being enhanced recruitment, retention and employeeengagement/commitment. Similar studies that have explored the beneﬁtsof being an ‘employer of choice’ (suggesting a strong employer brandreality, though not necessarily the conscious or explicit application ofemployer brand management) cite very similar beneﬁts. While theseimprovements do not necessarily represent business beneﬁts by and ofthemselves, there is a broad range of further evidence to suggest that thesethree factors can contribute signiﬁcantly to overall business performance.
Lower Costs
While the primary role of brands is generally to add value, strongemployer brands can also help to reduce costs. A North American studyconducted by Towers Perrin in 2003, involving 35 000 employees in the

USA and 4500 in Canada, revealed a clear correlation between levels of
employee engagement and cost of goods sold.4The most signiﬁcant area
in which costs can be reduced is in recruitment. Setting aside the cost ofgrowing the organisation, the cost of replacing employees – even toremain the same size – represents a signiﬁcant burden in most industrysectors. In their study United States at Work 2000 , human capital con-
sultants, AON, estimated that replacing an employee costs half of his or
her annual salary.
5US Conference Board estimates have been very similar
for entry level employees; however, for middle managers they estimated
the level as being closer to one and a half times annual salary and forsenior management level, two and a half times.
6If your staff turnover is
lower than that of your competitors it will provide you with an obviousadvantage in terms of your cost base, and strong employer brands tendto enjoy higher levels of employee retention. The Nationwide BuildingSociety, which came top of the Sunday Times list of Best Big Companies to
Work For in 2005, has a turnover rate of 9% against an industry average
of 15%. An internal source estimated that this equated to a cost beneﬁt
of approximately £1.5 million per percentage point per annum, based onan average cost of £8500 for recruiting and inducting each new memberof staff. The relationship between strong employer brands and high levelsof retention was further conﬁrmed by a US study conducted by HewittAssociates and Vanderbilt University.
7This research found that the
average employee turnover rate of the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work
for in America was 12.6% compared to the general average of 26% result-
ing in signiﬁcantly reduced recruitment costs.
Sickness absence is also a major cost burden to many organisations. In
2000 the UK’s Industrial Society estimated that sickness absence cost thecountry £13 billion a year, including both the direct cost of sick pay andthe more indirect costs involved in lost production, disruption, reducedefﬁciency and lost opportunity.
8In 2003, a UK retail bank study involv-
ing 20 000 employees conducted by the leading employee research ﬁrmISR, discovered that bank branches with above-average employee attitudeand engagement scores experienced a 14% lower level of absenteeism thanthose that were below average.
9The Conference Board estimates a loss of
$165 per missed workday per employee in the USA and recent researchundertaken by TNS identiﬁed that disengaged employees take an averageof 11 days more sick time per year.
1070 The ‘How To’ Guide

71
While recruitment, retention and sickness absence represent some of
the most clear-cut areas in which costs can be saved, there is also evidence
to suggest that high levels of organisational engagement can help toreduce costs across a number of other less obvious areas. In their 2003report, Understanding the People and Performance Link , the UK’s Work and
Employment Research Centre studied 12 leading UK organisations over
two years.
11Their ﬁndings from a detailed study of Tesco stores were par-
ticularly revealing in their demonstration that higher levels of employee
engagement were not only linked to higher overall performance, but alsoto important operational efﬁciency factors such as wastage (known loss)and shrinkage (unknown loss through theft and stock errors).
Customer Satisfaction
The rallying cry for many service organisations over the last decade hasbeen ‘living the brand’. This follows a recognition that differentiation inthe marketplace is generally reliant on the overall quality of the serviceexperience, and this experience is heavily reliant on the way in whichemployees behave towards customers. While employees’ understandingof the customer brand proposition is clearly important, it is generallyaccepted that the motivation to truly ‘live the brand’ requires a moregeneral commitment to (and from) the organisation. Most research intothe employee’s role in delivering customer satisfaction has thereforefocused on the broader concept of employee engagement and commit-ment (to the employer brand).
The most quoted case study in this area is probably the US retailer,
Sears Roebuck. In the late 1990s Sears set out to explore the link between
three key questions:
•Is Sears a compelling place to work for employees? (employer brandperspective).
•Is Sears a compelling place to shop for customers? (customer brandperspective).
•Is Sears a compelling place for investors? (ﬁnancial brand perspective).
What Sears discovered from its survey data from 800 stores was thatemployee satisfaction accounted for between 60% and 80% of customersatisfaction, and that a 5 unit increase in employee satisfaction correlatedThe Business Case

with a 1.3 unit increase in customer satisfaction, which in turn delivered
a 0.5% increase in revenue. This was one of a number of studies on whichHeskett et al. reported in their excellent book The Service Proﬁt Chain .
12
The link between employee engagement and customer satisfaction
has since been corroborated by a number of further major studies. The
Institute for Employment Studies’ UK report From People to Proﬁts ,13
involving research with 65 000 employees across 100 stores of a major
British retailer, demonstrated a strong correlation between employeecommitment, customer satisfaction (0.23) and sales (0.26). The GallupOrganisation’s Q12 Workplace Survey applied to a group of US retailcompanies in the late 1990s found that the top quartile stores foremployee satisfaction were associated with 39% above-average customersatisfaction scores.
14ISR’s retail bank syndicate study (2003) identiﬁed
that those branches with upper quartile engagement levels were associ-ated with 20% higher levels of ‘extremely satisﬁed’ customers than thosein the lowest quartile.
9Standard Chartered Bank’s study of their own
employee engagement and performance links similarly demonstrated that
retail branches with highly engaged employees were 1.7 times more likelyto achieve above-average customer satisfaction ratings.
15
While the majority of these studies have focused on retail organisa-
tions, there is also evidence to suggest that similar correlations between
employee engagement and customer satisfaction can also be demonstratedin other service sectors. The business to business, communications tech-nology company Nortel Networks claims to have identiﬁed conclusiveevidence from its own research of a clear link between employee engage-ment and customer satisfaction.
16Similarly, Sun Microsystems has
claimed to have found a strong link between ‘the likelihood of employ-
ees to recommend Sun as a place to work and the likelihood that cus-tomers will recommend Sun as a place to do business’.
16
Financial Results
While reducing costs and increasing customer satisfaction provide astrong business rationale for focusing greater attention on the employerbrand, the case ultimately rests on demonstrating a clear link betweenthe strength of the employer brand, high levels of employee engagementand ﬁnancial performance.72 The ‘How To’ Guide

73
Many of the retail studies quoted above have put a ﬁgure on the ﬁnan-
cial implications of higher employee engagement. The Sears study con-
cluded that a 4% increase in employee satisfaction translated into morethan $200 million in additional revenue. The IES From People to Proﬁts
study of a UK retailer demonstrated that an increase of one point in
employee commitment to the organisation (on a ﬁve-point scale) deliv-ered a 9% increase in sales per store, worth £200 000.
13In addition to
reducing the costs associated with absenteeism and increasing general
levels of customer satisfaction, ISR’s retail bank study also identiﬁed thata 10% improvement in employee attitudes/engagement to the organisa-tion would add 2.5% to the value of sales in the branch network per year.
9
Standard Chartered Bank’s study15found that retail branches with highly
engaged employees were associated with greater revenue growth ( +6%)
and greater proﬁt margin growth ( +100%).
These positive correlations between employee engagement and positive
ﬁnancial results are not limited to the retail sector. The most signiﬁcant study
in this area has probably been ISR’s three-year global study (1999–2001)involving 360000 employees from 41 companies across a range of industrysectors.
17The results demonstrated a strong correlation between levels of
employee commitment to the organisation and changes in both operating
margins and net proﬁt margins. On average, those companies with highlevels of employee commitment increased their operating margins by 3.74%over the three-year period, compared to a decline of 2.01% among those withlow commitment. Likewise, high-commitment companies increased theirproﬁt margins by an average of 2.06% over the period compared with a1.38% decline among low-commitment companies.
In Watson Wyatt’s Work USA study
18involving research with 12 750
workers across a range of different industry sectors, they demonstrated
that the three-year total return to shareholders was 36% higher in organ-isations with high-employee commitment (112%) compared with low-employee commitment (76%).
A study conducted by the Frank Russell Company demonstrated
that between 1998 and 2002 those organisations featured in the UKSunday Times list of 100 Best Companies to Work For delivered a
compounded annual return of 12.1% compared with a 5.8% overalldecline in the FTSE ALL Share index.
19Likewise, those organisations fea-
tured in the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For in America deliveredThe Business Case

a return of 9.86% compared with a marginal decline in the S&P 500 as
a whole over a similar period.
Summary
There is signiﬁcant evidence to suggest that a strong employer brand,associated with higher than average levels of employee engagement, willhelp you to reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction, and ultimatelycontribute to better ﬁnancial results. These are general business beneﬁtsthat are relevant to all organisations. There are also a number of furtherpotential beneﬁts relating to speciﬁc life stages and ‘rites of passage’ forthe organisation.
LIFE CYCLE BENEFITS
Young, Fast Growing Companies: Attracting ‘The Right Stuff’
For relatively new companies the primary beneﬁt of having a clear
employer brand proposition is the role it can play in helping to attractand retain good-quality candidates. If the company has ambitious growthplans, but a low proﬁle, it is often a strain to ﬁnd the right people tomatch the ambition and qualities of the founders, particularly the reservesof energy and fortitude required to grow from a small to medium-sizedenterprise. In most fast-growing entrepreneurial businesses the employerbrand tends to develop relatively organically, and in many cases theemployer brand is a direct extension of the founder’s personality. TheBody Shop original employer brand was probably 90% Anita Roddick;Richer Sounds, 90% Julian Richer; and Carphone Warehouse, 90%Charles Dunston. Nevertheless, a well-articulated employer brand propo-sition can help to clarify the scope of the company’s ambition, the typeof people it is looking for to help to develop the business, and the char-acteristics that make it both distinctive and likely to succeed. Rather thanresiding in formal values statements, these characteristics are often quitequirky cultural signiﬁers. The implicit character of the Added ValueGroup, a ﬁve-year old, fast-growing marketing agency that RichardMosley joined in 1995, was summed up in the shared language of ‘theChristmas party test’ (not as bad as it sounds), ‘radiators’ (upbeat per-sonality types) and the Generator (an approach to brainstorming ideas74 The ‘How To’ Guide

75 The Business Case
that neared the status of religious ritual). Alongside the character of the
two founding partners, these reference points were important in makingthe agency feel unique and reinforced a strong sense of shared identityand belonging. Allister Jones, the Communications Director of CarphoneWarehouse, described similarly distinctive forms of language and behav-iour that typiﬁed the early days of one of the UK’s most successful entre-preneurial companies of the last decade.
Coming of Age: Capturing the Organisational Spirit
In Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent book, The Tipping Point , he talks about
the signiﬁcance to an organisation of growing beyond 150 employees.20
He makes the point that from hunter-gatherer societies and agriculturalcolonies to military organisations, this number represents a naturaltipping point for communities. Beyond this point, the personal famili-arity, peer pressure and informally shared ethos that binds the grouptogether begins to break down, and more formal hierarchies, rules andregulations tend to be required to maintain group order and solidarity.Whether or not 150 represents the natural point of transition, the busi-ness beneﬁt of developing an employer brand proposition as an organisa-tion grows from feeling small and personal to large and impersonal is tohelp to identify and retain something of the spirit that drove the earlysuccess of the organisation and made it feel ‘special’ to its employees.
Going International: Translating the Employer Brand into
New Contexts
The beneﬁt of capturing the spirit and essence of the organisation in some
form of employer brand proposition becomes even more important whena company expands internationally. One of the reasons that Tesco probably put such great emphasis on making its core values explicit inthe mid 1990s was that it was beginning to step up the process of inter-national expansion that began in Hungary in 1994, and 10 years lateraccounted for over 40% of the retailer’s ﬂoor space. It soon became clearto Tesco that in building an international brand presence, exporting theTesco values was as important as transferring the company’s operationaland ﬁnancial practices. When ﬁrst setting up shop in a different country,employees seldom have prior experience of the organisation as a customer,

and expectations of management, employment and customer service can
vary signiﬁcantly from what may be taken for granted in the homecountry. For this reason, Tesco sends its very best managers to embodythe Tesco ethos in new countries rather than relying on the operatingmanual. As David Reid, Tesco’s deputy chairman, recently put it: ‘Wesend our best people abroad, people who are good with people, and whocan translate Tesco values into the local market.’
21
Merger and Acquisition: Forging a Shared Sense of Identity
and Purpose
Mergers and acquisitions involve a distinct set of new challenges for
organisations in addition to those involved in organic growth. The over-riding business goal in most M&As is to reduce the shared cost base andadd greater value through leveraging the complementary strengths ofeach organisation. The ﬁrst of these goals tends to be far more straight-forward than the second. Reducing head-count generally requires a moreclear-cut intervention than getting different groups of people to worktogether to generate new sources of value. The business beneﬁt of anemployer brand strategy in this context is to help to deﬁne and commu-nicate this shared platform for future growth and prosperity.
M&As mark a signiﬁcant ‘moment of truth’ for employer brands. In
attempting to forge a common sense of purpose and identity from twopreviously separate employer brands, the senior management team has toaddress a number of difﬁcult questions.
1. How different are the existing employer brands from each other in
terms of the implicit (cultural) and explicit (contractual) relationship
with employees?
2. What are the respective advantages and disadvantages of maintaining
each employer brand vs subsuming one within the other, or creatinga new brand?
3. To what extent should the culture and values of the organisations be
actively hybridised to create something stronger?
The answer to these questions will determine whether the primaryemployer brand task is: creating a common core (e.g. Compass); advocacyand assimilation (e.g. Vodafone subsuming numerous companies across76 The ‘How To’ Guide

77
Europe to create a commonly branded network); or reinvention (e.g. the
creation of Diageo from Guinness, United Distillers and IDV).
Corporate Reinvention: Refreshing the Self-Image
There comes a time in the life of any organisation when it feels the needto reinvent itself, and this transition is often accompanied by a new cor-porate identity. The business case for employer brand development in thiscontext is the need to ensure that the employee experience and sense ofrenewal matches up to the more superﬁcial revitalisation of the visualidentity. New corporate identities always seem to meet the same ques-tion: Has the organisation really changed, or is it just image manipula-tion? Given the raised expectations and carping cynicism that accompanymost identity changes, there is a signiﬁcant need to demonstrate that thechange is more than skin deep. From an employer brand perspective, mostemployees will realise that the organisation is unlikely to changeovernight with the advent of new signage, but they will expect to be clearabout the new direction, refreshed sense of purpose and value that under-pin the transformation in identity. Employees are also likely to expectsome substantive changes in addition to the new look. Consider, forexample, the internal expectations (and scope for cynicism) raised by BP’s Helios mark and associated mission to propel the company ‘beyondpetroleum’.
To a greater or lesser extent (depending on the frequency of change and
the proﬁle of the new incumbent) similar expectations tend to greet the
arrival of a new CEO. With the advent of a new CEO people within acompany generally expect change, and for a few months the CEO has theopportunity to revitalise not only their investment rating, but people’sperceptions of the company they work for (the employer brand).
Revitalising the Customer Brand Proposition: Living the Brand
In many cases, but not always, corporate revitalisation is accompanied bya new service promise to customers. Classic brand repositionings of thiskind include the 1960s Avis campaign ‘ We’re number two, we try harder ’,
the 1970s TSB campaign ‘ The bank that likes to say yes ’, Midland Bank’s
‘The listening bank ’ and the 1990s Fedex campaign ‘ Whatever it takes ’. TheThe Business Case

primary business need in this case is to ensure that employees perform
appropriately to meet raised customer expectations and deliver on thebrand promise. What if your employees don’t try hard enough? Feelobliged to say no? Aren’t very good listeners? Then you have a problem.The role of the employer brand in ensuring that employees both under-stand and commit to the new service promise is to identify how the organ-isation’s treatment of employees can model the kind of brand experiencethey are expected to deliver to customers. Employees are unlikely to ‘livethe brand’ unless they experience it for themselves, and if employees failto deliver on the brand promise, the investment in marketing the newmessage is likely to be counterproductive.
Burning Platform: Re-instilling Fresh Belife
If you have suffered a major blow to proﬁtability due to a shift in marketconditions or, worse, your corporate reputation has suffered a nosedivebecause of misdemeanours at the top of the organisation, it is likely thatyour employer brand reputation will require as much remedial attentionas your ﬁnancial balance sheet. The Reuters case study in Appendix 1provides a classic example of how redeﬁning and relaunching employerbrand values can help to re-instill a strong sense of self-belief in employ-ees and hasten the return to ﬁnancial growth.
Functional Beneﬁts
This chapter has so far covered the potential beneﬁts of strengthening theemployer brand to the overall business. You may also wish to take a morefunctional perspective. What’s in it for the HR function? Marketing func-tion? Communications function? We believe that it is worth addressingeach of these in turn, as demonstrating the beneﬁt of employer brandingto each of these key functions can have a major impact on how success-ful the organisation is in constructing a truly ‘joined up’ employer brandstrategy.
Beneﬁts to the HR Function
In Chapter 4 we addressed the need for change within HR, particularlythe recognised need to adopt a more strategic perspective. We believe the78 The ‘How To’ Guide

79
employer brand approach can help in making this transition by address-
ing two of the central paradoxes at the heart of strategic HR manage-ment. As Dave Ulrich pointed out in his inﬂuential call to action, Human
Resource Champions , the ﬁrst of these challenges is HR’s role as both stra-
tegic partner to the business and employee champion.
22As he states:
‘Resolving this conﬂict requires that all parties – HR, management andemployees – recognise that HR professionals can both represent employ-ees and implement management agendas.’ In a similar way the tools ofbrand management are designed to address this balancing act by helpingto deﬁne and mediate between the value of the brand to customers andto the business. It’s generally in the customer’s interest to demand morefor less. It’s generally in the business’s interest to offer less for more. Ifthis sounds familiar in the context of employee pay negotiations, webelieve there is a distinct beneﬁt in extending this conscious and explicitbalancing act to the broader relationship (the ‘psychological contract’)between the employee and the organisation.
The second paradox is the requirement for HR to be both agents of
change and guardians of stability. As Ulrich points out: ‘Businesses must
balance the past and the futur e… the beneﬁts of free agency and control
. . . efﬁciency and innovation.’ As we stated in the previous chapter, thissecond balancing act is also a central feature of effective brand manage-ment, and we believe that the well-honed tools associated with this dis-cipline can be of great beneﬁt to the HR profession in addressing thiscomplex and highly demanding challenge.
A further major beneﬁt of adopting the employer brand approach is
the scope it provides for more seamless integration with the ‘external’business agenda. For example, the marketing and HR functions often failto agree because they tend to use different language and models todescribe very similar objectives. Adopting a ‘joined-up’ model of in-ternal and external brand relationship management can help to clarify andresolve many of these apparent conﬂicts and ensure that the internal andexternal agendas can be brought into closer alignment.
Beneﬁts to the Internal Communications Function
Employees seldom express much satisfaction with the quality of internalcommunication within their organisation. They generally feel overloadedwith apparently irrelevant and inconsistent information from too manyThe Business Case

different sources. This is seldom the direct fault of the communications
function which generally appreciates the need for more joined-up com-munications planning. It tends to result from the failure of senior linemanagers (and colleagues from other functions) to consider either thebigger strategic picture or the perspective of the audience. The principalbeneﬁt of taking an employer brand approach is the way in which it encourages senior line managers to view employee communication in a more similar light to customer communication. It reinforces the strategic role of internal communication in shaping how people perceivethe organisation and its leadership. Employees seldom trust a manage-ment team that continues to send them inconsistent messages. It encour-ages managers to think in terms of target audiences, headline messages,beneﬁt-led persuasion and audience response, rather than just ‘getting thecommunication out’. The end beneﬁt to employees should be greaterclarity and less information overload, and to the communications func-tion an enhanced effect on engagement, performance and professionalrespect from their peers.
Beneﬁts to the Marketing Function
One of the most common complaints we hear from marketing peoplewithin service businesses is that their sphere of inﬂuence is seldomallowed to extend beyond brand communication. The employer brandperspective can provide an effective platform for transforming this notionof brand as communication to something more deeply rooted in the struc-ture, process and behaviour of the organisation. It can help to provide amore effective bridge between marketing and HR, and, just as essentially,between marketing and the leadership agenda for organisational change.As Tim Ambler puts it in his book Marketing and the Bottom Line :
23
The similarities and market-driving potential of employee-based brand equity
should encourage HR and marketing to swap notes . . . Just as the provision
of metrics for the Exec presents an opportunity to rethink the relationshipbetween marketing and ﬁnance functions, so employer brand equity provides
a challenge bridging marketing and HR skills and information.
Finally, we believe that employer brand management can help to deliver
greater impact and credibility to internal marketing programmes thatseek to promote understanding of the brand, and the essential role that80 The ‘How To’ Guide

81
employees play in delivering a consistent brand experience. As Pringle
and Gordon commented in Brand Manners24:
All the good work on brand positioning, marketing and communication can
easily be undone by a poor interaction between a customer and a brandrepresentative . . . How often has a customer-employee ‘moment of truth’
turned into a relationship killer, rather than a loyalty builder?
Once employees recognise the brand in their own experience of work,
they are far more likely to embody the brand values in their interactionswith customers and build the kind of customer loyalty that every mar-keter is ultimately striving for.
WINNING SUPPORT FROM THE TOP
It is impossible to develop an effective long-term employer brand strat-egy without a clear mandate and proactive support from the leadershipteam. Without this senior support an employer brand approach is un-likely to carry the authority or attract the resource required to give theproposition real substance. The arguments and the evidence cited aboveshould help in the construction of a business case, but we would also liketo share a number of further tips that may help in delivering this case tothe CEO and management board:
1. Frame the employer brand strategy in terms that the senior team
will recognise. For example, if they are likely to have a relativelynarrow view of ‘branding’, use simpler and more direct expressionssuch as ‘reputation’ and ‘employee motivation’.
2. Lobby in advance to identify who you can count on for support, and
the most likely objections and counter-arguments.
3. Identify the challenges that the strategy will help you to address
(e.g. poor external image, difﬁculty in attracting talent, low em-ployee morale, poor retention).
4. Demonstrate how the strategy links into the overall business plan,
and will help to deliver against key goals and targets.
5. Explain how it will complement (and help to coordinate) the other
HR, marketing and communications initiatives that are already inprogress.The Business Case

6. Provide benchmark evidence identifying how this approach has ben-
eﬁted other companies (particularly your competitors).
7. Make a realistic assessment of what you hope to achieve in terms of
cost savings or added value, and identify the metrics you will use
to measure success.
8. Clarify the investment in time and money required to deliver the
strategy and your expected return on investment.
9. Dramatise the beneﬁts of success (even the most hard-nosed invest-
ment decision involves an element of ‘gut feel’ and emotionalengagement).
10. Demonstrate the role that an employer brand programme can play
in reinforcing the leadership credentials of the top team (particu-
larly as ‘pathﬁnders’ within an extended group of companies).
Ultimately, there is an element of faith in making the business case for
the employer brand. One HR director, formerly a marketing director,pointed out the parallel with advertising:
I remember attending an advertising conference where one of the speakers
said: ‘The only thing that is ever certain about advertising is how much it isgoing to cost you.’ It’s the same thing here, but nobody would seriouslysuggest that as a reason for not advertising.
Throughout our research, there appeared to be a general belief that to
invest in activities designed to promote greater employee engagement,
senior management teams required a far more stringent level of proof thanthey required for other business activities. There was also a sense of frus-tration that the default position for many CEOs is to pay more attentionto the short-term cost beneﬁts of reducing head count than to the long-term value of building employer brand equity. Conversely, most charis-matic leaders, such as Richard Branson, or Charles Dunstone of TheCarphone Warehouse, were praised for espousing the power of theirpeople to make a difference, whether they have hard evidence or not. Itis our belief that the most successful companies have been those whoinvest in building high levels of employee engagement, while their com-petitors are still waiting for the evidence to emerge. If they are not careful,the evidence for those that wait too long may be their own demise.82 The ‘How To’ Guide

83
SUMMARY
1. Strong employer brands increase an organisation’s ability to attract,
retain and engage people. They also support the organisation’s ability
to deliver a consistent customer brand experience.
2. There is signiﬁcant research evidence to suggest that strong employer
brands help to reduce the costs associated with recruitment, staffturnover and sickness-absence.
3. Improving employee engagement and commitment to your em-
ployer brand is strongly associated with higher levels of customer satisfaction.
4. Organisations with higher levels of employee engagement are also
strongly linked with higher revenues, proﬁt margins and overall
returns on investment.
5. Effective employer brand management offers a range of different
beneﬁts to organisations at every stage of their life cycle.
6. The Human Resources, Marketing and Communications functions
can all beneﬁt from a more coordinated approach to developing and
managing the employer brand.The Business Case

Employer Brand Insights 8
The world’s most powerful brands are built on great insights into the
human condition, but as anyone in marketing soon recognises, there is farmore to developing and managing a successful brand than understandingcustomers’ needs and aspirations. When I started my career as a marketresearcher I recall a well-worn marketing director advising me: ‘If all youdid was respond to what customers asked of you, you’d soon go out of busi-ness.’ As my experience extended into marketing consultancy I eventuallyrealised that this sentiment was not driven by hubris, but humility in theface of the complex, multilayered varieties of insight required to success-fully manage a brand. To get it right, the brand owner must not only listencarefully to what customers say they need, but must also ﬁnd a way ofunderstanding their latent and implicit needs (that is to say, the needs theyhave difﬁculty expressing or are simply unaware of). In addition to under-standing the customer the brand owner must also understand the overallshape, size and dynamics of the market; the underlying organisational ortechnical capabilities supporting the brand’s competitive edge; the invest-ment required to launch and sustain the brand; and how this ﬁts withinthe overall investment portfolio and business goals of the organisation.
Within the employer brand context we believe that there is signiﬁcant
value in taking a similarly multifaceted approach. Understanding the
explicit needs and aspirations of your employees is a good starting pointbut it is not enough to ensure an effective internal brand strategy. As with customers you also need to develop an understanding of employees’implicit needs, and the organisational, cultural and labour market contextwithin which the employer brand will operate.
Before developing an employer brand strategy we suggest that you
need to address the following key questions:

1. How will a stronger employer brand support the business strategy?
(Refer to ‘The Business Case’, Chapter 7.)
2. What kind of employer brand strategy will support the leadership
agenda? (Refer to ‘The role of leadership’, Chapter 5.)
3. What are the main factors currently driving employee engagement
and commitment?
4. What kind of organisational culture do you have? How consistent
is it across geographical and divisional boundaries?
5. What do employees currently regard as particularly characteristic of
and distinctive about the organisation? Is there a consistent core of
opinion that is shared by all employees?
6. Do people have a strong sense of the organisation’s purpose and
values (both implicit and explicit)? How much of a gap is therebetween the stated ideology of the company and what people actu-ally experience?
7. What behaviours are felt to be most characteristic of the organisa-
tion? What are the ‘moments of truth’ when your organisation is atits best (and worse)?
8. What is the most useful way of segmenting the employee population
in terms of their cultural characteristics or distinctive needs?
9. What are the most effective channels of employee communication,
both top-down and bottom-up?
10. What kind of employees does your organisation most value and
need, now and for the future?
11. What are the main requirements of these target groups in the
context of the external labour market?
12. What are the most consistently attractive and compelling organisa-
tional attributes for both current employees and potential recruits?
The remainder of the chapter seeks to provide the most effective way ofanswering these questions, by providing a range of appropriate researchtechniques.
EMPLOYEE INSIGHTS
As Simon pointed out in Chapter 4, a rough estimation of UK invest-ment in employee research compared with market research suggests that86 The ‘How To’ Guide

87
approximately 10 times more is spent on understanding consumers than
employees. The total membership of the UK’s Market Research Societyis 8000. The Employment Research Group that provides a forum for MRSmembers interested in employee research contains no more than 150.Why is this? It’s probably not that most companies value their customersmore than their employees, though, as Tesco found in the late 1990s, thatis often how employees feel. Experience suggests that it is because man-agement teams believe they already understand their employees, at leastenough to manage them effectively. A leading research provider once sug-gested to me that the objective of most employee research is not to under-stand employees but to measure them. This may be too extreme adistinction since sophisticated analyses of quantitative data can certainlydeliver important insight; however, there is probably an element of truthin this. There is a tendency for managers to use survey data like theproverbial drunk uses the lamp-post, more for support than illumination.Most surveys continue to focus on relatively generic factors like thequality of management, teamwork, training and development, commu-nication, etc. The emphasis is generally placed on identifying and ﬁxingareas of below-average performance. Far more is spent on measuring what
people think than understanding why. In medical parlance, this is more
akin to keeping an eye on the vital signs (heartbeat, blood pressure) than
developing a fully rounded understanding of what it will take to deliverpeak performance.
From the perspective of the marketing insight specialist, the standard
employee research toolkit appears very limited. Most organisations con-tinue to conduct an employee survey no more than once a year. Focusgroups tend to be used to throw additional light on particularly thornyissues. This ad hoc research is sometimes combined with other sources ofcontinuous data, like sickness-absence, staff turnover and exit interviews.This compares with sophisticated marketing research users such asUnilever, who identify over 25 different sources of insight in their stan-dard market research toolkit, not counting the additional tools they havedesigned speciﬁcally to combine and distil different sources of insightinto a coherent platform for action.
We are not suggesting that the employee research budget should match
the customer research budget, or that the approaches used to understandemployees are exactly equivalent to those used to understand customersEmployer Brand Insights

and consumers. However, to establish the kind of insights required to
develop an effective employer brand, we believe it is worth consideringthe use of a broader palette of research tools than the conventionalemployee survey.
Employee Engagement and Commitment
For a long period of time most employee research surveys focused onemployee satisfaction. The problem with satisfaction is that it is rather avague term. Claiming you are satisﬁed could cover a very broad spectrumfrom complacency (‘I’m satisﬁed because my job is comfortable and unde-manding’) to commitment (‘I’m satisﬁed because I’ve found an organisa-tion I really believe in’). Clearly, most organisations would rather havesatisfaction at the commitment end of this spectrum, so most employeesurveys have now shifted their focus to deﬁning and measuring more performance-oriented terms such as employee ‘commitment’ or employee‘engagement’. The issue in shifting the emphasis to these new terms isthat they are more difﬁcult to measure directly. While most employeesare likely to have no difﬁculty in stating whether they are satisﬁed or notwith the company they are working for, they are less likely to be able torespond as directly to questions about their level of engagement or com-mitment. For this reason, these measures tend to be composite termsderiving from a series of other more speciﬁc questions. While there is alarge amount of published research covering the differences betweenengagement and commitment, there is still a lack of common agreementover exactly what they mean. Of the ﬁve major benchmark studies intothis area that we consulted before writing this book, three focused on theterm ‘engagement’ (ISR, Towers Perrin, IES) and two on the term ‘com-mitment’ (TNS, Watson Wyatt), but the deﬁnition of these terms coveredvery similar ground.
1–5Most are composite deﬁnitions, drawn from the
following:
•Support for the goals and values of the organisation (ISR, TP)
•Belief in the organisation’s products/services (IES)
•Sense of pride and belonging (ISR, IES, WW)
•Satisfaction with the immediate job or career prospects (TP , WW ,
TNS)88 The ‘How To’ Guide

89
•Willingness to go the extra mile (ISR, TP , IES)
•Advocating the employer to others (ISR, TP , WW)
•Intention to stay (ISR, TNS).
Within the HR community, ‘engagement’ currently appears to be the
more favoured of these two terms. From an employer brand perspective,both terms are equally acceptable for summarising an employee’s re-lationship with their employer, as long as the scope of the term (in termsof the contributory factors, featured above) is clearly deﬁned and com-municated. However, it may still be worth differentiating the two termswhen conducting further analysis. Engagement is generally regarded as amore immediate state (more like the weather than the climate), whereascommitment suggests a more enduring belief in the company. It is possible for an engaged employee to lack longer term commitment, andfor a committed employee to feel temporarily disengaged. My benchmarkreference point for this is the BBC, where it appears typical for manyemployees to express a long-term vocational commitment to the BBC asan institution, while feeling continual disenchantment with the way theBBC works as an organisation.
Benchmarking
Once you have deﬁned and measured employee engagement within yourorganisation, the ﬁrst question that the senior management team willgenerally ask is: ‘How good or bad is that compared with other organ-isations?’ Many of the large, well-established employee research agencies,such as ISR, have developed an impressive databank of normative bench-marks, and can tell you how your scores compare with your industry peergroup, and the more general, but also more testing, index for high-performing companies.
While there may be some issues in comparing like with like, there are
also some published benchmarks for engagement according to region and
business sectors, which can provide you with a general guide. The ﬁrstof these (Figure 8.1) is taken from a global study by TNS (2002) involv-ing 20 000 workers across 33 countries.
4
The sample set of national benchmarks in Figure 8.2 is taken from a
global study conducted by ISR (2004) involving 160 000 employees from
10 of the world’s largest economies.1Employer Brand Insights

90 The ‘How To’ Guide
41%55%51%49%47%45%44%43%40%40%39%38%37%37%28%
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%TotalOtherEnergy (Utilities/Oil & Gas)EducationProfessional ServicesScience and TechnicalComputer/Internet/MIS/DPHealthcare/MedicalFinancial ServicesGovernmentRetail/SalesManufacturing/ProductionTransportation/DistributionLeisure ServicesTelecommunications
Figure 8.1 How commitment compares across business sectors. Source: TNS
(2002)
SingaporeCanadaAustralia
Hong KongNetherlands
GermanyBrazil
UKUSA
France75
75
72
70
70
67
66
66
65
59
Global Composite = Average Engagement
scores across 10 countries
40 80 1000 6070
Figure 8.2 The ISR Employee Engagement Index, variations by country: Source:
ISR (2005)

91
Another approach to benchmarking is to take part in one of the many
‘Best Employers’ surveys that have been established over recent years. The
two most popular are: The Sunday Times: 100 Best Companies to Work For ,
and the Financial Times: Best Workplaces (in the UK and EU). These surveys
provide the opportunity for your organisation to enter a league table of
employers, all of whom are rated according to a short employee ques-tionnaire, and a separate management submission, usually completed bythe HR team. Whether you make it onto the league table or not, everyorganisation that takes part receives a customised benchmark reportshowing how you compare in relation to the others.
This can be an easy and cost-effective way of establishing your engage-
ment and employment performance ratings, particularly for small to
medium-sized organisations that may lack the ﬁnancial resources toemploy one of the major employee research agencies.
Correlation Analysis
One of my favourite research quotes is: ‘ I don’t drink Guinness because of the
advertising; I drink it because it’s good for me .’ (The advertising tagline for
many years was ‘ Guinness is good for you ’.) While this quote may be
apocryphal, it illustrates one of the central truths of good research, that
people are often unaware of (or unprepared to admit) what drives theirbehaviour. Another classic example is the political polling question:‘Would you vote for the party that raises taxes to support greater investment in
health and education? ’ The answer to this question is invariably ‘yes’,
however, the results from party elections would strongly suggest that
people’s behaviour when it comes to casting their votes is somewhat dif-ferent. The point is that to understand the factors that attract people toan organisation, motivate them to perform at their best, and explain whythey leave, you often need more than direct answers to direct questions.
Correlation analysis seeks to identify the factors driving ‘key perform-
ance indicators’ such as employee engagement, commitment and loyalty,
by establishing their statistical correlation with other questions (conﬁ-dence in leadership, good internal communication, etc.). In simple terms,if 90% of the employees expressing strong commitment to the organisa-tion also claim a high degree of conﬁdence in the leadership team, andsimilarly, most people expressing low commitment claim low conﬁdenceEmployer Brand Insights

in the leadership, then it is fair to assume that leadership is an important
factor in driving employee commitment.
We will cover some of the results from recent benchmark studies in
the next chapter on the employer brand proposition, but some of the most
pioneering work in this ﬁeld has been conducted by the employee researchconsultancy ISR. In a global study involving 360 000 employees from 41companies (2001), ISR identiﬁed the four major factors driving organ-isational commitment as being: (i) quality of leadership, (ii) opportuni-ties for development, (iii) empowerment and (iv) the people managementskills of employee’s immediate managers.
6
Continuous Research
Since it is now commonplace for employees to be described in terms ofhuman capital or assets, it is surprising how many organisations conductan employee survey only once a year, bi-annually or even less frequently.It would be regarded as foolhardy to check your organisation’s ﬁnancialstatus no more than once a year, so why is a more continuous approachto employee research so uncommon? We suspect this is because employeeresearch is seldom regarded as business as usual. It is regarded as an addi-tional effort, no doubt necessary, but nevertheless a potential interruptionto everyday business, involving a large input of data that needs to be col-lected, analysed, digested and responded to. It feels more like an initia-tive than a regular feature of the way the organisation is managed. Thisis not how most businesses research their customers and consumers. Thegreat beneﬁt of adopting a more continuous approach is that you candevelop a far better understanding of how employees are responding toevents over time. Change is a constant feature of most organisations, andtaking an annual snapshot of employee opinion can be rather a hit-and-miss affair. The context within which an ad hoc survey is conducted willseldom match the conditions of the previous survey. An organisation cannever be sure of the degree to which it is recording employees’ responsesto changes since the last survey or the more immediate context withinwhich the survey is taking place.
As our client John Lewis discovered when we helped them establish a
continuous survey process in 2003, seeking people’s views on a more con-tinuous basis also enables the senior team to identify and respond to issues92 The ‘How To’ Guide

93
much more quickly. When levels of employee engagement begin to fall
the effect on performance is sometimes delayed. By the time the problemshows up in the ﬁnancial numbers, the issues driving the downturn haveoften taken root, and are far more difﬁcult to rectify. Rather than dis-rupting the business, this approach makes employee research a regularfeature of business as usual, enabling the management team to pick upand address issues as they arise and avoid the indigestible backlog of issuesoften associated with less frequent surveys.
The other more speciﬁc beneﬁt of continuous research is that it makes
it easier to match employee data with customer satisfaction and sales
data. Many organisations have found that establishing the link betweenemployee engagement, customer satisfaction and sales/proﬁtability can be anextremely valuable exercise in that it helps to quantify the return on the organ-isation’s investment in people management. As we mentioned in the previouschapter, this linkage has become a regular feature in many retail businesses,and is now being picked up across a wide range of other industry sectors.
Culture Mapping
Employee surveys tend to be used to measure the people managementperformance of the organisation and, in conjunction with correlationanalysis, can provide a good indication of the factors most likely to bedriving employee engagement. However, conventional surveys tend to beless effective at identifying the longer term cultural characteristics of theorganisation. You may ﬁnd from a conventional survey that your score forteamwork is generally low. What it is less likely to be able to tell you iswhether this is the result of a speciﬁc management intervention (like per-formance management), a training issue (poor team management skills),or a more deeply rooted cultural characteristic (‘this company has alwaysfavoured individualism’).
If you are setting out to strengthen the employer brand it is impor-
tant to understand not only the immediate ‘climate’ of employee opinion,but also the longer term culture of the organisation. Culture, like per-sonality, is often a difﬁcult concept to deﬁne precisely, because it describesgeneral patterns and tendencies rather than a reliable objective reality.Nevertheless, like brand personality, the notion of organisational culturecan be very useful in getting a handle on how people generally perceiveEmployer Brand Insights

the organisation works. What do people regard as normal within the
context of the organisation? What kind of behaviour tends to be rewardedor frowned upon? What kind of people tend to do well within the organ-isation, or struggle to ﬁt in? These are particularly useful questions to askif you are trying to deﬁne and develop the employer brand, because theculture of the organisation is a good way of describing the current brandreality, as opposed to its value statements, which tend to be more closelyrelated to the brand vision. More simply put, culture is descriptive (theway things are); values are aspirational (the way things should be).
One of the commonest ways of researching organisational culture is to
present people with a series of bipolar scales describing the general pref-
erences of the organisation. Each employee is asked to provide an opinionon how the collective people within the organisation tend to think andact, rather than how he or she, personally, tends to think and act. (Askingfor both perspectives can be valuable in providing additional insight intothe level of ﬁt between employees and the organisational culture.)
There are a number of standardised cultural frameworks that can be
used for this purpose. Two of the most widely used are Geert Hofstede’s5-D model
7and Fons Trompenaars’ seven-dimensional model.8The main
focus of both these models is cross-cultural diversity within multinational
organisations; nevertheless they can still provide a useful starting pointfor mapping any organisation. The following summarises some of themost common dimensions used in models of this kind:
Inner directed/organisational focus vs Outer directed/customer focus
Past/stability vs Future/changeRisk averse/incremental vs Risk taking/creative innovationShort term/operational reality vs Long-term/strategic visionPeople/relationships vs Performance/transactionsIndividualism/stars vs Collectivism/teamRules/process vs Flexibility/resultsHierarchy/title vs Meritocracy/taskControl/top-down vs Empowerment/involvementRational/analytical vs Intuitive/‘gut feel’Formal/reserved vs Informal/emotive
The purpose of this mapping exercise is to provide the organisation with
a more explicit framework for measuring the cultural tendencies of the94 The ‘How To’ Guide

95
organisation. This can help to identify the potential gap between where
you are (brand reality) and where you need to be (brand vision) to achieveyour organisational goals. It provides a valuable context for reviewingcurrent values or developing new values by identifying the degree of res-onance or dissonance with the current culture. It also helps to determinethe degree of cultural consistency across geographies, divisions and oper-ating units. Does the organisation have widespread commonalities?Where are the dividing lines? This exercise is particularly useful in thecontext of a merger or acquisition where two potentially different cor-porate cultures are being brought together.
Brand Roots
Mapping the broad cultural characteristics of the organisation will onlytake you so far. This exercise may help you to determine the ‘type’ oforganisation you have, but not what makes it unique. If you think of itin terms of understanding each employee, the knowledge that some areextrovert, intuitive, thinkers and judgers (following the Myers–Briggsdimensions) could be very helpful in working out how best to managethem, but it won’t be enough to deﬁne any one as a unique individual.
9
If you were describing a colleague to a friend, you’d be a lot more spe-ciﬁc. You’re more likely to say something like: ‘She’s a real northerner,down to earth, calls a spade a spade, spends a lot of time up mountains,and despite her slim build, she never stops eating.’ In other words, youwould focus much more on what makes her different. Where she’s from.How she tends to express herself. The kinds of thing she likes doing.From an employer brand perspective it’s useful to understand both thetype of culture you have (for the purpose of general positioning), and thespeciﬁc elements of history and ‘personality’ that differentiate your organ-isation from every other.
So where do you look to ﬁnd what makes your organisation unique? To
begin with we suggest you conduct a bit of desk research. Brand managers
tend to start their stewardship with an induction into the history of thebrand. This helps them to understand the brand’s roots, the story of itsorigin, and the key milestones in its history. I recently picked up a leaﬂetcelebrating the 75th anniversary of the tea brand PG Tips, and learned thatthe ‘Tips’ referred to the top two leaves and bud of the tea plant from whichEmployer Brand Insights

the product was originally derived. I also found out that blue and green
have been the brand colours since it was very ﬁrst introduced in 1930 andthat the chimps’ advertisement, ﬁrst screened in 1956, was the longest-running TV campaign in the UK. This kind of information puts the brandinto context. It helps to identify what is deep-rooted and authentic, andprovides important insights into the character and personality of thebrand. This kind of exercise is equally valuable for employer brands.What’s the organisation’s story? Where and how did it start? What sig-niﬁcant events have shaped the organisation over the course of its history?For some longstanding organisations there are published histories. Weigh-ing up the differences between the ofﬁcial, authorised versions and un-authorised ‘inside story’ accounts can be particularly revealing. For mostothers you will have to do some digging. If there is no ofﬁcial archive, thebest place to start is talking to the ‘elders’ within the organisation, long-serving employees ‘who remember the early days’. It’s surprising how oftenyou can ﬁnd an unofﬁcial archivist, if you can’t locate an ofﬁcial store ofhistorical memorabilia. While we would not suggest you need to write afull history of the organisation, establishing some of the key dates, per-sonalities and ‘moments of truth’ for the organisation can provide valuabledepth to your understanding of the current employer brand, and someuseful material for your induction process.
Projective and Enabling Techniques
The second route we suggest in identifying the unique characteristics ofan organisation is to conduct workshop-style employee focus groups. Thefocus in this case is nottheir views on more immediate issues such as the
latest business strategy, the quality of their local management or their
personal needs, but more general observations about the organisation as a
whole. It is often useful to divide these sessions between recent joinersand longer serving employees. Recent joiners can offer a relatively freshperspective on the way the organisation seems to work, as well as insightinto the gaps between their early experience of the organisation and theirexternal expectations as candidates. Longer serving employees bring awider range of experience, and are generally more able to differentiatebetween the ofﬁcial line (‘this is what we’re meant to say’) and the insidestory (‘but this is the way it really works’).96 The ‘How To’ Guide

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In consumer research it is common to use what are called projective
and enabling techniques (such as personiﬁcation and role playing) to
explore thoughts and feelings that people often ﬁnd difﬁcult to expressin response to direct questioning. We have found these to be extremelyuseful in the context of employer brand research, as people often ﬁnd itdifﬁcult to provide a full and rich response to direct questions about thepersonality or culture of their current organisation. One of the reasons forthis is that culture tends to be assumed and implicit, and it is often dif-ﬁcult for someone within a culture to describe it objectively. For long-serving employees especially, the way in which things work appearsself-evidently normal, and it is difﬁcult for them to describe what is dif-ferent or unique about it. The other great beneﬁt of using these tech-niques is that people ﬁnd them a lot more energising and stimulatingthan your average focus group.
The following represents a selection of the exercises that we have found
useful in providing both great insights into how people perceive theemployer brand, and a rich and stimulating source of outputs for illus-trating the key ﬁndings of the research.
Sunny Side Up
•Best of : What would you put in the advert to present the very best of
what the organisation can offer?
•Heroes: Who would appear in the organisation’s hall of fame and why?
•Legend: How would Disney tell the organisation’s story if they made
it into a ﬁlm?
•Greatest hits: What records would you choose for a celebratory party
album?
•Perfect day: Describe a perfect working day.
The Shadow Side
•Rough guide: What don’t they tell you at induction that you need to
know to survive and prosper?
•Villains: Who are the black sheep of the organisation, and why?
•Obituary: What would be written on the organisation’s tombstone if
it went out of business in the next few years?
•Hell: What would be the key characteristics of a typically hellish
day?Employer Brand Insights

Personiﬁcation
•Personality – If the organisation were represented by a single person,
what type of person would that be? (It often helps to start with a few
iconic examples, like Marks & Spencer, Nike or McDonalds to warmpeople up.) Once people have entered the spirit of this exercise youcan also ask a series of more speciﬁc questions like: What kind of carwould they drive? What kind of paper would they read? What kindof pets would they keep? etc.
•Employer vs customer brand – If the employer brand name is the same
as the product/service brand, divide the group in two, and ask one
subgroup to focus on the employer brand, and the other the customerbrand (as they would expect customers to see it).
•Brand party – Repeat the above exercise for a number of your main
rivals, and then describe what would happen if they all met at a party.
Describe how they would behave. Who would get on with whom?Who would dance all night? Who would spend the whole nighttalking in the kitchen? etc.
•Celebrity – Who would be the most appropriate celebrity to represent
the organisation as it would like to see itself? And as it actually is?
•Organisational stereotypes – How would you describe a typical cast of
employees from the organisation?
Summary
We suggest that these techniques are used to elicit people’s open andspontaneous perceptions of the organisation before any pre-preparedstimuli are introduced, such as recruitment materials, proposition state-ments, or values. The reason for this is to clearly differentiate betweenthe employer brand reality as it currently exists in people’s heads, and themore formalised statements represented by the current or potentialemployer brand vision. When you prompt people on the values of theorganisation, a useful technique is to ask them to consider ‘moments oftruth’ for each value. To take an external example, a typical moment oftruth for a service brand is when something goes wrong. Your baggagedoesn’t turn up at the airport you’re ﬂying to. The air conditioning isn’tworking in the hotel you’ve booked into on a stiﬂingly hot day. How doesthe company offering the service respond? That is the moment of truth.98 The ‘How To’ Guide

99
For an organisation that states ‘transparency’ as a value, the moment of
truth comes when something has gone wrong and you want to ﬁnd outwhat’s going on. For an organisation that claims ‘respect’ as a value, it ishow the organisation deals with an operationally successful manager whois consistently disrespectful to employees.
One further line of enquiry that can be very useful in diagnosing the
underlying dynamics of the employer brand is to ask how people perceive
the organisation to be changing over time, through such questions as:
•What symbolises the past? What seems to be on the way out?
•What most represents the ‘here and now’, or ‘the ﬂavour of themoment’?
•What are the emerging signs of the future? What seems to be on theway in?
Through these exercises you are searching for the signiﬁcant stories thatpeople tell about the organisation: the language and metaphors they use,and aspects of the corporate body language they believe to be symbolicof the way things work. You’re looking for the characteristics of the organ-isation that energise the employees and give them pride – that is, the‘passion points’ that strike an emotional chord with people. You’re alsolooking for the tensions between corporate rhetoric (the way things aresupposed to be) and the everyday reality (the way things really are), par-ticularly at those moments of truth when a key value or corporate beliefis put the test.
Observation
One of the simplest forms of organisational research is to take an out-sider’s perspective and simply observe the way in which the organisationoperates. This will generally require a trained, external observer; however,there are a number of simple techniques that you could try for yourselves.The ﬁrst of these is to try to describe what you see as if you were ananthropologist recording the habits and rituals of a strange tribal culture.Before you start, try this exercise. Take off your watch and put it in yourpocket. Then draw the face of your watch in as much detail as you can.Despite the fact you have probably looked at your watch hundreds oftimes, most people ﬁnd this task quite difﬁcult. That is the differenceEmployer Brand Insights

between looking and actively seeing . With this in mind, here is a short
checklist for taking a fresh look at the organisation around you. In each
case describe what you see, then try and draw some conclusions aboutwhat you think it signiﬁes about the organisation.
•Public spaces – External architecture. Reception areas.
•Working environment – Arrangement of space. Expressions of hierarchy.
Shared vs private. Open vs closed. Neat vs cluttered. Use of wall space.
•Comfort zones – Coffee facilities. Canteens. Toilets.
•Dress codes – Formal vs informal. Degree of conformity. Expression of
hierarchy.
•Meetings (both large and small) – Time keeping. Allocation of time to
telling, listening, discussing, generating ideas, making decisions.
•Social events – Seasonal celebrations. Ad hoc celebrations. Leaving
parties.
Segmentation
Most of the approaches we have described above set out to discover what
is common among employees, their shared needs, motivations, percep-tions and values. However, most organisations are diverse, and are gen-erally seeking to become more diverse. In addition to ﬁnding the commonground, it is therefore necessary to determine an effective way of respond-ing to this diversity. Segmentation is a tool used to identify the most sig-niﬁcant and meaningful way of dividing people into groups who can becatered for differently according to their speciﬁc needs. There is a prac-tical limit to segmentation, since the beneﬁt of addressing individualgroups is soon outweighed by the cost if the target group is too small, orthe total number of target groups too great. This is an important factorto consider in the context of employees, where the potential criteria forsegmentation (age, sex, level, function, region, psychographic proﬁle,etc.) can often appear as numerous as the employees themselves. In someobvious respects, some form of segmentation is already inherent in suchcommon features of employment as pay scales and job grades. However,a number of companies have begun to push the concept of segmentationfurther (see the Tesco case study – Appendix 2), and we believe the appli-cation of this technique is likely to grow in both frequency and sophis-tication over the coming years.100 The ‘How To’ Guide

101 Employer Brand Insights
One of the most useful forms of segmentation is to cluster people
according to the level and primary focus of their engagement. For
example, the TNS commitment survey conducted in 2002 and 2004measured commitment on two axes: commitment to the organisation, andcommitment to people’s career, or type of work.
4The four main segments
this analysis produced were as follows:
•Ambassadors (41%), deﬁned as those fully committed to their
company and to their work/career. (Tend to be mid to upper man-
agers and high performers.)
Primary commitment drivers:
Performance management/achievement– Company has an effective system for evaluating performance.– My ability to achieve and to move the company forward is a key
reason why I work here.
Leadership– I have strong conﬁdence in the leadership of this company.– I have strong conﬁdence in my department leadership
•Career Oriented (20%), deﬁned as those more dedicated to
their career than to their company. (Also tend to be top performers,but looking for training and development to improve their skills.)
Primary commitment drivers:
Work culture/empowerment– I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.– I have control over the way I work.– I have sufﬁcient authority to carry out my job effectively.Performance management– I know what I need to be successful at my job.– I have a clear understanding of how my job performance is judged.
•Company Oriented (8%), deﬁned as those whose commitment to the
company surpasses their commitment to their work and career. (Solid
corporate citizens, with solid skill set but limited talent.)
Primary commitment drivers:
The company overall– People at work have a real interest in my well-being.– My company’s a fun place to work.

– I feel valued as an employee.
– My company has good physical working conditions.Fairness– Procedure for considering employees for job openings is fair.– All employees are given equal opportunity.
•Ambivalent (31%), deﬁned as those who are committed to neither
their company nor their career. (Tend to be low talent/low skill.)
Communication Audits
It is essential for any brand manager to develop a sophisticated understand-
ing of the range of channels that are available, and which are the most effective for different target audiences or different types of message. In thisexternal context, in addition to delivering a speciﬁc message or packet ofinformation, every piece of communication the customer receives is also designed to reinforce the overall brand proposition. We believe that anequally sophisticated understanding is required for internal channels if the employer brand is going to perform a similar role for internal communication. (This is a subject we will explore further in a later chapter.)In auditing the current communication framework we believe that the employer brand manager needs answers to the following series of questions.
•Sources – How, when and from whom is the content for internal cor-
porate communication currently sourced? Is the current range ofsources providing the information required? Do you have the rightmix of sources? Too many sources? Too few? Are they being providedwith clear information about their responsibilities?
•Content – How do you currently segment the information you com-
municate in terms of type (strategy, news, social, etc.), relevance (corporate, divisional, unit speciﬁc, etc.), importance (priority, for ref-erence, etc.) or response required (action this day!, provide feedback,cascade, etc.)? Do you have the right balance of content? To whatextent is the content currently aligned?
•Editorial control – Who has responsibility for editorial control or
message management and for what types of information? How effective is editorial control in aligning communication with a102 The ‘How To’ Guide

103
common agenda? How effective is it in ﬁltering communication for
relevance? Is there sufﬁcient air-trafﬁc control to avoid informationoverload?
•Audiences – How do you currently segment your audiences? How
could you segment your audiences to improve the relevance and effec-
tiveness of your communication? What are the primary needs of eachaudience? Are the key audiences getting what they need and want?
•Transmission channels – What channels are currently available (includ-
ing face to face)? How and when are they used both in terms of
sending and receiving communication? Are key audiences getting theinformation they need through the channels they prefer? Is the rightmix of channels being deployed to get the information through?
•Feedback channels – What channels are currently available? How and
when are they used? Are the current feedback channels accessible,regular enough and effective enough to provide good quality responseand input to decision makers?
•Response/action – Who has responsibility for ﬁltering and responding
to feedback? Is feedback receiving sufﬁcient recognition and respon-sive action?
Additional Sources
In addition to these research-speciﬁc channels, there are a number offurther potential sources of insight that can prove valuable to explore.
Leavers’ Interviews
Well conducted and consistently reported leavers’ interviews can shedvaluable light on engagement and retention issues.
Performance and Development Reviews
These can be particularly useful in tracking the uptake of value-relatedbehaviours. Managers should also be encouraged to report on regular pat-terns of response that may suggest new and emerging issues.
Sickness-Absence and Health Screening
Indications of stress within the company can provide a useful counter-indicator to positive engagement. In some cases, this kind of unhealthyEmployer Brand Insights

stress can also exist at the opposite end of the engagement spectrum. In
a high-commitment, high-performance culture, widespread stress symp-toms and growing levels of sickness-absence can indicate the need to reignin the number of hours people devote to the organisation to ensure thatperformance remains sustainable. This was such a common issue in Japanthat some years ago the government introduced a major campaign toensure that people took their holidays.
LABOUR MARKET INSIGHTS
The main factors driving retention and motivation are not necessarilygoing to be the same factors that drive the desirability of the companyto potential employees. For this reason, it is also important to conductresearch into the labour market from which the company will be seekingto recruit. The phrase ‘war for talent’ has been used to dramatise theincreasing difﬁculty many employers have experienced over recent yearsin attracting people of the right quality to meet the needs of their busi-ness. This is not just a question of attracting ‘top talent’ for managementpositions, but ﬁnding people with the right mix of qualities to success-fully perform a wide variety of roles throughout the organisation.
Ensuring the ‘right ﬁt’ is also as important as attracting high quality.
Getting the employer brand proposition right is just as much an exercisein targeting the right kind of candidates for employment as ensuring thatyou have a large number to choose from. During an economic downturn,when more people are competing for employment, it could be argued thatemployer brand becomes less important. However, in ensuring that thecompany stays focused in targeting and attracting the right kind of can-didates, the discipline that an employer brand approach brings to therecruitment process can be more essential than ever.
From an employer brand research perspective we suggest the follow-
ing steps.
Clarifying the Target Market
Deﬁning and segmenting the target market is often the ﬁrst essential step
in effective brand development and management. In the employer brandcontext, the overall target proﬁle often starts with a deﬁnition of the104 The ‘How To’ Guide

105
values and attitudes that the organisation is looking for in all of its
employees. If you are truly seeking to ‘live the brand’ it helps if youremployees already share the core values of the organisation. A secondaryconsideration, which is now becoming more common, is recruiting fordiversity. This may sound as if it conﬂicts with the agenda for sharedvalues, but the kind of values and attitudes that most organisations arelooking for tend to be well distributed across the range of different groupsgenerally considered under the heading of diversity. This need not meanpositive discrimination according to gender, ethnic background, sexualorientation or disability, but it may determine where and how you seekto advertise for candidates.
The second stage is then to segment the market according to levels of
experience and the types of skills and competencies you are looking for.
This need not be exhaustive, but it helps to map out the sources of talentfrom which you are most often seeking recruits – for example, graduates,front-line service personnel, professional managers, functional specialists(e.g. Marketing, IT, Engineering). If you are clear about the main targetgroups, it becomes a lot easier to conduct further research into the dis-tinctive needs and aspirations of each group, and their awareness and per-ceptions of your organisation. It also becomes easier to monitor yoursuccess in attracting the right kind of recruits. What proportion of can-didates match your ideal proﬁle? What are the relative application andacceptance rates among each group?
Needs and Aspirations
Once you have deﬁned and segmented your target market the next stepis to identify the most important factors in determining your targetgroups’ choice of employer. In external marketing research you generallystart with the basic ‘tablestakes’ required to attract people, then progressto a more speciﬁc analysis of individual subgroups. Some of the mostobvious tablestakes in employment include a basic demonstration of trustand respect, but there may be a number of growing tendences that willcause you to judge more carefully. For example, does the growing inter-est in work–life balance mean that some form of ﬂexible working shouldnow be offered to all employees? How should you respond to growingexpectation that even the humblest of employees should be able to Employer Brand Insights

participate in some form of self-development? There are a great many
studies to choose from in making this general assessment. McKinsey’sseminal study ‘The War for Talent’
10still holds many relevant insights
into attracting talented people into every level of the organisation, and ifyou are looking for a more down-to-earth and acerbic commentary on thesubject you should try Mike Johnson’s Talent Magnet .
11
Having established the baseline, the next step is to consider the more
speciﬁc needs and aspirations of individual target groups. There are somepublished studies that have looked at speciﬁc groups, such as graduates,and could provide you with a starting point, but in most cases you’regoing to have to conduct your own research. The most cost-effective placeto start is with your own employees. A number of organisations havebegun to conduct Joiner’s Surveys or focus groups, which can providesome very useful insights into the criteria used by different types ofemployee to make their choice. Some companies, such as Warner, havetaken this a step further by setting up regular under-30s staff forums toexplore what modern job-seekers are looking for from organisations.
Conducting research among current employees will clearly provide
only a partial view of a target group’s needs and aspirations, as it will be
biased towards those who were positively disposed towards the organisa-tion. It is useful, therefore, to incorporate a number of these key ques-tions into the recruitment process itself to identify unmet needs that maybe leading to rejection. Recent research from the recruitment ﬁrm Reedclaimed that two-thirds of people have turned down new job offers, andwith growing levels of employee conﬁdence, evaluating rejection isbecoming an increasingly critical component in understanding the com-petitive dynamics of the marketplace.
For particularly important, or difﬁcult to recruit, target groups, such
as engineers, it may also be worth while conducting more targeted
surveys, focus groups and individual interviews in the marketplace.While this can be both difﬁcult and expensive to organise, the beneﬁt interms of getting the proposition right for these groups can be signiﬁcant.
Employer Brand Image
It is common for product or service brand marketers to use some form ofbrand relationship ladder that starts with basic awareness, and progresses106 The ‘How To’ Guide

107
through trial, and repeat purchase to brand loyalty and active brand ad-
vocacy. This is an interesting concept to apply to the employer brand,although it involves a number of additional dimensions. In the contextof employment we suggest that it would be useful to have a viewpointon the answers to the following questions in relation to each target group:
•Name Recognition – How many people are likely to recognise the
name of the organisation?
•Awareness – Of the people that recognise the name of the organisa-
tion, how many are likely to have a reasonably accurate idea of whatthe organisation does? What is generally known about the organisa-tion’s products or services? What is generally known about the size,scope and success of the business? What, if anything, is known aboutthe organisation’s employment record and practices?
•Saliency – How many people in the target group would consider your
organisation if they were seeking a new employer? What are people’s
general perceptions of you as a potential employer? To what extent isthis answer based on general perceptions of the industry sector ororganisational type? Which other organisations would people includein their ‘wish list’ of employment preferences?
•Trial – What are the leading reasons for making an application?
What impression of your organisation is given by your recruitment
materials and activities? Your website? What, if anything, do peoplehear about your organisation when they ask around?
•Brand experience – What are people’s ﬁrst impressions on joining
the organisation? To what extent does it meet with their expectations?
What are the most signiﬁcant gaps between their image of the organ-isation before joining and their experience?
•Retention and advocacy (in addition to the other subjects covered
under ‘employee insights’) – How does people’s image of the organ-isation change as they become more of an insider? What would peopletell potential recruits about the organisation?
•Alumni – How do people describe the organisation to others once
they have left? To what extent do they remain active advocates?
Brand mapping is another common technique that marketers use tounderstand their relative positioning in the marketplace. It involves pre-senting people with a variety of brand names on cards or Post-It NotesEmployer Brand Insights

that they should group according to degrees of similarity. This exercise
can usually be performed without much direction, and can be very reveal-ing about how people categorise different types of employer. The exercisecan also be conducted in response to a number of relevant prompts – forexample, how would you group these brands according to their CVappeal, or level of care towards employees? Even though people may onlyhave a very superﬁcial understanding of the employment practices of eachcompany, it is surprising how readily they can categorise different organ-isations into general types.
In addition to researching people’s perceptions it is also valuable to
conduct an analysis of the competitors who tend to turn up in your target
market’s salient sets. Most organisations’ websites incorporate materialaimed at prospective employees, and this information, along with theirrecruitment advertising, can be used to analyse their underlying propo-sition. It can also be used to compare more speciﬁc details about the kindof beneﬁts employees could expect from different organisations.
SUMMARY
1. Just as the most powerful product and service brands are founded on
a multifaceted approach to insight building, it is equally important
to adopt a wide range of tools and techniques to acquire the insightsnecessary to develop and manage an effective employer brand.
2. Understanding the key drivers of engagement and commitment is a
critical step in helping to deﬁne a powerful employment proposition.
3. The ‘culture’ and ‘personality’ of your organisation are often the most
challenging to make explicit, the most likely to provide sources of
differentiation, and the most dangerous to ignore in deﬁning yourcore values.
4. The best starting point for labour market research is your own most
recent recruits, but you need to be mindful of the limitations of thisapproach.
5. Researching the external labour market is generally more challeng-
ing in logistical terms than employee research, but there are a numberof useful tools that can be adopted from customer research.
6. The concept of a brand relationship ‘ladder’ can be a useful way of
integrating your labour market insights with your employee research.108 The ‘How To’ Guide

Employer Brand Positioning 9
The previous chapter should have provided you with the insight tools you
need to identify how the employer brand is currently perceived and ex-perienced (the brand reality) and the kind of employer brand that wouldimprove your appeal to potential recruits, and lead to higher levels ofengagement, retention and brand advocacy (the brand vision). Thepurpose of this chapter is to bring all of these elements together into abrand positioning model that will provide the principal navigational toolfor developing and managing the brand experience.
BRAND IDENTITY
The ﬁrst place to start is to establish the internal positioning of the employer brand. There are three principal kinds of employer brandrelating to different positions within the brand identity hierarchy of anorganisation.
Monolithic
This is where the organisation uses the same brand name and visual iden-tity throughout all its operations. The brand name that people buy ascustomers is the same brand name that people work for as employees.Examples include: Tesco, Reuters, HSBC, Nokia and Vodafone. Themonolithic employer brand needs to clarify its relationship with the cus-tomer brand, and the other key facets of the corporate brand, includingvision, purpose, values and public affairs.

Parent
This comes in two versions. In the ﬁrst version there are two levels of
organisation brand, a corporate parent brand and an operating companybrand. Examples include: WPP , RBS, Compass and Kingﬁsher. In thiscase, the parent employer brand needs to clarify the parameters withinwhich it expects its subsidiary company employer brands to operate. Inthe second version, the corporate brand provides an umbrella for a numberof different product and services brands. Examples include: Unilever and P&G. This type of employer brand needs to work consistently withthe other key facets of the corporate brand including vision, purpose,values, trade relationships and public affairs. Increasingly, as in theUnilever example, it also needs to consider the role of consumer brandendorsement.
Subsidiary
This represents the operating company counterpart to the parent brand.The employer brand is typically the same as the customer brand. Ex-amples include: NatWest, Direct Line and Coutts, all of which belong tothe Royal Bank of Scotland Group. The subsidiary employer brand needsto clarify its relationship with both the parent brand and the customerbrand.
BRAND INTEGRATION (CUSTOMER AND EMPLOYER BRANDS)
Many brand positioning models within service companies are dominatedby the customer perspective despite the fact that employees experiencethe brand in a different way to the customer, and are motivated by dif-ferent types of beneﬁt. The model shown in Figure 9.1 presents a moreintegrated approach. To ensure brand integrity, it recognises that somebrand qualities need to shine through every stakeholder’s experience ofthe brand, while others need to be speciﬁcally designed to meet the dif-ferent needs and aspirations of customers and employees.
While the customer brand and employer brand compete in two dif-
ferent markets – one for products and services; the other for talent andcommitment – they are closely interrelated. The employer brand, in110 The ‘How To’ Guide

111 Employer Brand Positioning
attracting the right employees and maintaining their commitment to
high performance, plays a critical role in building and supporting thecustomer brand. Likewise, the strength of the customer brand plays animportant role in attracting the right people to come and work for thecompany. Once employed, the pride they share in the company’s externalreputation helps in maintaining their loyalty and commitment to deliv-ering on the company’s brand promises to its customers. The model helpsto clarify these interrelationships and manage them more effectively byproviding a more integrated platform for strategic planning and delivery.
CORPORATE BRAND HIERARCHY (PARENT AND SUBSIDIARY)
As any parent will agree, it’s difﬁcult to strike the right balance betweencontrol and freedom, between encouragement and discipline, betweenconcern and interference. It’s no different for the management of a holdingcompany. There are, of course, further issues to consider, such as the beneﬁts of standardisation vs the beneﬁts of local ﬂexibility. While there‘The brand people
purchase’
‘The brand people
work for’Customer Brand
Proposition
Employer Brand
PropositionCORE PROPOSITIONShaping a positive
brand experience
that drives trial,
repeat purchase
and brand advocacy
Shaping a positive
brand experience
that drives attraction,
retention,
engagement
and brand advocacyBenefits
Differentiators
Reasons to believe
Ensuring
brand integrity
Benefits
Differentiators
Reasons to believeCommon Focal Point
Values and Personality
Figure 9.1 An integrated brand model. Source : People in Business

is a general tendency for corporate parents to seek beneﬁcial synergies,
even the most carefully managed global brands, like Coca-Cola, have gone‘glocal’ to meet the speciﬁc needs of their local markets. Brand con-sistency provides a powerful advantage in clarifying the brand message,but only up to a point. If brands do not resonate with their local markets,consistency counts for nothing. This is just as true for employer brandmanagement as it is for the customer-facing brand. Where there are twolevels of branding, the general rule is to align the employer brand asclosely as possible with the customer-facing brand to ensure integritybetween the internal and external faces of the brand. Unless, of course,the longer term strategy is to develop a more monolithic brand identity,in which case the employer brand can begin to pave the way from theinside out.
Assuming the longer term corporate strategy is to maintain a two-tier
branding structure, we would advise the parent brand to tread relatively
lightly in terms of the employer brand values, personality and beneﬁts,and focus on establishing a more generic foundation of shared best prac-tice. There are three main areas in which parental intervention workseffectively in this regard. The ﬁrst is corporate ethics. Very few subsidiarycompanies would argue against working within a shared framework ofsound ethical principles (though our recommendation would be to callthem principles and not core values, as this tends to get muddled withlocal brand values). The second is management training. One of the majorbeneﬁts of working within a large corporation is the potential headroomit provides for long-term career development, and becoming the man-agement brand is generally a very effective positioning for the corporateemployer brand. The third is best practice sharing (not to be confusedwith standardisation). While management teams constantly defend theirown room to manoeuvre, they also tend to be the ﬁrst to criticise a silomentality, and providing forums and channels for sharing best practice isprobably one of the most popular ways for the parent brand to add value.
The centralisation of HR and the provision of shared services has
become an increasingly common approach. It has worked reasonably effec-tively in monolithic organisations where there is only one employerbrand, but we suggest caution in applying it to multiple branded organ-isations where HR has a key role to play in supporting different localemployer brand cultures.112 The ‘How To’ Guide

113
Where parent brands most appear to overstep the mark is in trying to
apply corporate values and wholesale programmes of culture change across
a wide variety of local operating companies, where the corporate ideol-ogy conﬂicts with the dynamics of the local brand. Even in mono-lithically branded companies there need to be appropriate degrees offreedom to adapt to the local cultural environment. Ask anyone whoworks in Europe for a US-based parent company, and they will tell youthat this is a constant subject of negotiation. For a parent brand operat-ing in different geographical markets, under different brand names, it iseven more of a mistake, or at least a waste of money, because it is veryseldom successful.
THE KEY COMPONENTS OF THE POSITIONING MODEL
The following describes one approach to deﬁning your employer brandpositioning, but for the sake of internal consistency we would recommendyou adapt it to align with the positioning model currently being used foryour corporate or customer brand. Since we believe this approach toemployer branding can help to ﬁll a gap in most conventional position-ing models, we would hope that this process of adaptation works in bothdirections.
We recommend that you conduct this positioning exercise twice – ﬁrst
for the brand reality and then for the brand vision. Our positioning model
(Figure 9.2) is divided in two. The upper section contains the core brandelements (common to all), and the lower section the employee valuepropositions for more speciﬁc target groups.
THE BRAND REALITY MODEL
The purpose of the brand reality model is to summarise how the employerbrand is currently perceived and experienced by your key target groups.It is designed to be an aggregate view, describing the organisation as itis commonly viewed, not the organisation at its best or worst. Unless youhave a particularly strong external brand image as an employer, wesuggest that you conﬁne the reality model to your current employees. If you have a strong external image, we only recommend that youcombine internal and external perceptions if they are closely aligned. ItEmployer Brand Positioning

is otherwise better to construct two reality models, to help to deﬁne any
perceptual gaps. This exercise is as much an art as a science, and howevermuch research you have conducted you will still need to make judge-ments about what is important. Don’t try to include every angle. The aimis to distil your description down to the most essential ingredients.
Current Employee Proﬁle
Have you favoured particular types of recruit (particularly at managementlevel)? If so, what is the typical proﬁle of your current employees, and thetypes of people you are seeking to recruit? This may appear to be a dif-114 The ‘How To’ Guide
Specific Customer and Employer Brand PropositionsCore proposition: distinctive focal point ,rallying call, ‘big idea’
Brand values: fundamental guiding principles and beliefs
Brand personality : personal and cultural characteristics, tone, feel and style
ENDURING AND CONSISTENT THROUGHO UTCore Proposition
Target profile: definition of target audience
Proposition: compelling statement of value
Benefits: reasons for choosing and advocating the brand
(Highlighting differentiators and detailing tangible reasons to believe)
TAILORED TO EACH TARGET AUDIENCE
CONSTA NTLY REFRESHED AND UPDATED
Internal External
Figure 9.2 The brand platform. Source : PiB

115 Employer Brand Positioning
ﬁcult question to answer, but whether the organisation is conscious of it
or not, there tends to be a general understanding of the kinds of people who will ‘ﬁt in’, and it helps to make this explicit when you deﬁneyour employer brand proposition, and your standpoint on organisationaldiversity.
Current Employer Brand Proposition
What is the most common reason given for people’s commitment andloyalty to the organisation? If a number of common reasons are given,state no more than two or three. If there is very little commonality, state‘Unclear’. If you already have a formally stated employer brand proposi-tion, you should only use it here if it is substantiated by employees.
Current Values and Personality
What are the mostly commonly described characteristics of the organ-isation? State no more than six to eight in total. Don’t worry too muchat this stage about discriminating between values and personality traits.They often overlap.
As above, you should only include current formalised value statements
if they are spontaneously corroborated by your employees. Be honest. If
your employee research suggests any commonly held negative views,include them. To give you an illustration, the HR Director of a City lawﬁrm once claimed that the two descriptions most used by employees todescribe the organisation’s partners were ‘arrogance’ and ‘greed’. Inbeing honest, you may also need to be brave.
Current Beneﬁts
What do employees most commonly describe as the beneﬁts of workingfor your organisation? This should be a more extensive list than thereasons for commitment deﬁned under the brand proposition. You shouldalso try to differentiate and prioritise the perceived beneﬁts for each ofthe target groups. We suggest that you focus on the functional beneﬁts(‘good pay’, ‘good career prospects’). While it may be appropriate toinclude some emotional beneﬁts (such as ‘caring’) for speciﬁc targetgroups, it is likely that the most common emotional beneﬁts will havealready been deﬁned as values or personality traits.

Current Differentiators
Underline the features above which employees most believe differentiate
the organisation from others. Does what you do provide the most dis-
tinctive focus, or howyou do it?
THE BRAND VISION MODEL
The purpose of the brand vision model is to deﬁne the kind of employerbrand that the organisation would like to develop to improve your appealto potential recruits, and lead to higher levels of employee engagement,retention and brand advocacy. It is important to establish your time framefor this model. If you feel that your current offer is a lot stronger thanemployees perceive it to be, you may set a relatively short time frame,with an emphasis on sharpening your communication of current beneﬁts.If you believe there is a lot more work to be done on the underlying offer,it may be more realistic to set a 3–5 year time frame for realising theemployer brand vision. This should also be aligned with the widercontext. For an integrated employer/customer brand you will need to con-sider the time frame within which the customer brand is working. Like-wise, the corporate strategy may be working within a given time frameto achieve certain business goals, or to realise a long-term vision.
Target Employee Proﬁles
It is increasingly common for organisations to deﬁne the kind of atti-tudinal and value proﬁles that they wish to recruit into the organisation.From a brand perspective, the proﬁle of customer-facing employees is par-ticularly important. Many organisations have stopped trying to force theirvalues onto people with endless pep talks, rigid processes and scripts asthis often makes the customer service feel artiﬁcial. As Alex Marples ofKaisen commented in relation to his consulting work for Lego: ‘Ratherthan trying to adjust the values to ﬁt the people, our job is to select thosewho ﬁt the environmen t… you can’t force people, it’s like chasing water
uphill.’
1
To work effectively this approach needs to be balanced with a healthy
dose of diversity, particularly at the management level. In many organ-isations the problem is not that people don’t ﬁt, but that they ﬁt too com-116 The ‘How To’ Guide

117
fortably with the prevailing organisational view of the world. This can
be as equally damaging as attitudinal dissonance with the prevailingvalues, since creativity and innovation, the lifeblood of long-term busi-ness success, are highly dependent on creating an environment in whichpeople feel able to challenge existing norms. There is no easy answer tothis paradox. Every organisation needs to make its own judgement on themost effective balance between conformity and diversity, but at the veryleast it should have the debate, and make its conclusions explicit whenit comes to deﬁning the employer brand positioning.
The Employer Brand Proposition
What is the most compelling reason why people should describe yourorganisation as a great place to work? One of the key beneﬁts a brandproposition offers is focus. VWs have come in a wide range of shapes andsizes over the last 40 years, but the core proposition for the brand sincethe 1960s has been ‘reliability’. This core proposition brings integrity tothe whole brand offering and a consistent platform on which to buildmore speciﬁc features and beneﬁts. An effective employer brand proposi-tion should play a similar role in bringing focus and consistency to theemployee’s experience of the organisation.
The ﬁrst reference point for this proposition should be the organisa-
tion’s corporate vision or mission. Do these statements of intent encap-
sulate a ‘big idea’ that can be translated into the employment context?By ‘big idea’ we do not mean a bigger market share or the greaterenrichment of shareholders, we mean something of more universal valuethat the organisation believes it can bring to the world. In his book ofthe same title, Richard Jones described a ‘big idea’ as something thatwill: ‘Create a special and palpable spirit within the busines s… [and]
appeal equally to people inside and outside the organisation.’
2Among the
examples he gives are IKEA’s ‘Democratisation of design’, Starbucks’‘Coffee as a cult’ and Virgin’s ‘Iconoclasm’.
Microsoft provides a good example of translating this kind of ‘big idea’
into an employer brand proposition. Microsoft’s big idea is ‘Realisingpotential’, with a unifying mission to ‘work to help people and businessesthroughout the world realise their full potential’. In turn, this has beentranslated into an employer brand proposition that focuses on creatingEmployer Brand Positioning

‘an environment where great people can do their best work, and realise
their potential’. It has also helped them to integrate their employer andcustomer brand communications which both share the tagline: ‘Yourpotential. Our passion.’
If you do not feel that the corporate vision or mission provides an
appropriate ‘big idea’ with which to align your proposition, the next
place to look is the customer brand proposition. If the employer and cus-tomer brand name is the same, there is a clearly an advantage in tryingto create a strong link. Take First Direct, for example. Its customer propo-sition states: ‘The real difference about First Direct is simple. Most banksare about money. First Direct is about people.’
3As they also say, it’s a
simple idea, but also ‘revolutionary’, in the context of banking services,
and a big enough idea to translate directly into their proposition, whichexpresses what this focus on people means in the employment context:‘We’re warm and witty. We’re straightforward. We’re understanding andresponsive. We’re unique.’
SouthWest Airlines provides a similarly good example of this align-
ment of the employer and customer brand proposition from the USA. In
1999 it translated its customer proposition, ‘A symbol of freedom’, intothe employer brand proposition, ‘Freedom begins with me’.
4This propo-
sition was not only used to emphasise the value that employees deliver
to customers by giving them the freedom to ﬂy, but also to reinforce thevalue to employees of the free ﬂights, and wide range of other beneﬁtsoffered by the company.
If you are struggling to make such a direct connection with the cor-
porate vision and purpose or customer proposition, there are a number of
other avenues that may provide you with a compelling and relevant hook.In most cases this involves building on one of the organisation’s estab-lished (or potential) strengths, as illustrated by the following list ofrecruitment slogans taken from recruitment advertisements appearing inThe Times Top 100 Graduate Employers
5:
•Career opportunities (Morgan Stanley: ‘ Strides not steps ’)
•Personal growth (AstraZeneca: ‘ Space to grow ’)
•Freedom (Orange: ‘ Go where you want to go ’)
•Global reach (Baker & McKenzie: ‘ Expand your horizons ’)
•Challenge (Army: ‘ Be the best ’ and P&G: ‘ A new challenge every day ’)118 The ‘How To’ Guide

119
•Creativity (BAE systems: ‘ Platform for innovators ’)
•Cutting edge technology (Airbus: ‘ Setting the standards ’)
•Inherent value (GSK: ‘ Together we can make life better ’)
•Spirit (Diageo: ‘ If we could we’d bottle it ’)
•Conﬁdence (Slaughter and May: ‘ Look forward in conﬁdence ’)
•Intelligence (WPP: ‘ Ambidextrous brains required ’)
•Intrigue (MI5: ‘ For a life less ordinary ’)
•Sector appeal (Arcadia: ‘ Are you cut out for fashion ?’)
•The total package ( JP Morgan: ‘ The 360 °career ’)
While these are recruitment slogans rather than fully rounded proposi-
tions, they provide an indication of some of the positioning routes thatyour organisation may consider.
Before you ﬁnalise your employer brand proposition you should ask
yourselves the following questions.
•Is it sufﬁciently aligned with the corporate and/or customer proposition?
•Is it credible?
•Would current employees recognise the underlying truth of theclaim?
•Could you provide tangible evidence to substantiate the claim?
•Is it relevant and compelling?
•Does it strike the right emotional chord with both your internal andexternal target audiences?
•Does it differentiate you from your most immediate competitors?
If the answer is ‘yes’ to all of the above, then you are likely to have awinning proposition.
Values
Most organisations already have a set of values, if not several sets of values.It is not uncommon for corporate values to live alongside brand values,and in some cases several often competing sets of value-like descriptors.In one case we came across an organisation that presented eight ‘culturalcharacteristics’, eight ‘core competencies’, ﬁve ‘organisational values’ andfour ‘brand values’. We found out subsequently that they also had a dozenEmployer Brand Positioning

ethical principles, but presumably there wasn’t room on the page to
present them. Comprehensive, you may agree, but clear? There has deﬁ-nitely been a general tidying up and rationalisation of value statementsover recent years. About ﬁve years ago I was involved in producing a newset of corporate brand guidelines for the BBC. When I ﬁrst arrived therewere 16 core values. After much soul searching this was whittled downto 11 brand values. There are now six. I seem to remember some scien-
tiﬁc research that claimed that most people could hold no more than ﬁve
separate thoughts in their heads at any one time. That feels about right,and the vast majority of value statements today list no more than ﬁve orsix. The point is that not only do people have difﬁculty rememberingmore than a handful of value statements, but you can only describe a rea-sonably limited number of values as ‘core’.
In the context of the employer brand the temptation to avoid is adding
an additional set of values to those already in existence. In most cases, themain task is to ensure that the current values are made relevant and mean-ingful to employees. If the values were deﬁned solely in the context ofcustomers, you are likely to have to work harder at this than if the valuesare already corporate and organisational. If there are competing sets ofvalues, the task is to simplify and rationalise. As mentioned in an earlierchapter, one way of doing this is to clarify the difference between genericorganisational principles, and speciﬁc customer brand values. This simpleact of repositioning often helps to differentiate between the different roleseach set of statements play.
If the task is to create a new set of values or to refresh the old set of
values, then we suggest that you try as hard as possible to keep it simple,and keep in mind both employees and customers. The rationale for thisis that employees are far more likely to believe that the values are auth-entic and ‘live the values’ in their interactions with customers if thesevalues are reﬂected in their own experience of the organisation. It’s a verysimple concept, and one that is often overlooked. People tend to treatothers as they are treated themselves. If you look after your employees,they are far more likely to look after your customers.
First Direct again provides a good example of this approach. Their
values are: Openness, Respect, Contribution, Responsive, Right ﬁrst timeand Kaizen (better and better). These are customer brand values, but theystress that they are also their employer brand values. They are designed120 The ‘How To’ Guide

121
to shape their employees’ experience of First Direct as much as the cus-
tomer experience. As their Commercial Director, Peter Simpson, com-mented: ‘You can’t pretend to be one style of brand to your consumersif you’re a different style of brand to your people. It’s the people whodeliver your company interface; therefore the two have to be the same.’
6
In deﬁning your values you also need to be mindful of the real values
that currently exist within the organisation (the brand reality). Stray too
far in an overly aspirational direction, and the value statements will lackcredibility. There is always a temptation for the leadership team to gettogether and dictate what they think the values should be. Unless thehouse is burning down, and a more dictatorial lead is expected, we wouldrecommend a more democratic approach. The most successful value pro-grammes that we have witnessed and been involved in have tapped intothe inherent aspirations of employees. Most people want to work in abetter organisation. Most people would prefer that organisation to be theone in which they currently work. Employees tend to have a good feel forwhat the organisation can be like at its best, and it is within this zone ofreasonable stretch that we believe most value statements should bepitched.
It also helps to provide some differentiation. People in Business
recently conducted some analysis into the value statements of the FTSE100 companies. The top ﬁve most frequently stated values will come aslittle surprise. Of the 50 companies that publish their values on theirwebsites, 38% stated ‘integrity’ as a core value, 26% ‘teamwork’, 24%‘innovation’, 22% ‘respect’ and 18% ‘performance’. These values repre-sented the bedrock of corporate value statements, however, the tail of rel-atively unique statements was surprisingly long. Most of these topcompanies play relatively safe with the majority of their values, but gen-erally have one or two that are truly differentiating – for example, BP’sstatement of ‘green’ as one of its four core values. Very few of these topcompanies have promoted environmental concern from the general ranksof CSR principles to front-ranking values. Likewise Compass Group’sstatement of ‘diversity’ as a core value was a relatively rare exception. Ifyou choose ‘creativity’ (Cairn Energy), ‘urgency’ (GSK), ‘straightfor-ward’ (BT) or ‘decisiveness’ (Cable & Wireless), you will be taking thepath less trodden. Choose ‘imagination’ within this corporate commu-nity and you would be unique.Employer Brand Positioning

Personality
If values state what the organisation believes in, the employer brand
personality describes how these beliefs tend to be expressed in terms oftone and style. To some extent the two concepts are closely intertwined;however, some important features of an organisation’s personality tend tobe missed if you just focus on values. The personality of an organisationgenerally shines through in its communication style. This will tell youwhether the organisation is down to earth, serious, passionate, caring, off-beat, challenging, fun, the kind of adjectives you’d use to describesomeone you know reasonably well. It helps to deﬁne your personality ifyou are striving to bring greater consistency to the overall tone and styleof your communication. As with values, the customer brand propositionshould be one of your ﬁrst points of reference. If you are trying to com-municate a certain kind of personality externally, it helps to ensure thatthis is carried through to your internal communications. Ideally, theexternal brand personality should already reﬂect the internal culture. Ifnot, there may be some serious work to do to bring these two facets ofyour brand into closer alignment.
Customers have a very keen nose for the inauthentic, and they will
notice just as fast as your employees if there is something phony in thepersonality you’re trying to project if it’s not deeply rooted in how theorganisation feels. Take McDonald’s, for example. There appears to be ahuge gulf between the happy, smiley, family orientation of the externalbrand personality, the tired, McJob drudgery of its front-line employeesand the faceless, corporate machine that appears to exist behind thefaçade. By its own recognition, McDonald’s has lost its way over recentyears, and refreshing the personality of the organisation to bring it morein line with the ‘I’m lovin’ it’ ideal of the customer brand is as much onthe agenda as salads and fresh fruit. In comparison, Virgin Atlantic is anexample of an organisation whose youthful, vibrant, somewhat sexy brandpersonality feels true to the core. Their employees always seem to be genuinely upbeat. Their recruitment advertising, like their customeradvertising, is quirky and fun. One of their most recent campaigns fea-tures real crew members portraying the ‘Gods and Goddesses of GoodService’. This includes ‘Gusto, the God of gentle breezes and youthfuljourneys’, and ‘Somnia, the Goddess of starry skies and splendid122 The ‘How To’ Guide

123
slumber’. This has not only proved highly successful in attracting new
recruits, but also highly popular among the current cabin crew whose rolein delivering a ‘heavenly service’ experience it clearly recognises and cel-ebrates. As a ﬁnal indication of this brand’s integrity, I recently discov-ered that the internal team brieﬁng process at Virgin Atlantic is calledV .I.A.G.R.A. Enough said.
Beneﬁts
In the employment context, beneﬁts usually mean ﬁnancial perks like apension or a private health scheme. What we mean in the employer brandcontext is the wider range of functional and emotional beneﬁts that peoplederive from their experience of work. Many of these, such as career oppor-tunities and personal growth, we have already touched on in terms of theproposition statement. While the proposition statement should try tocapture the most compelling advantage offered by the employer, theoverall positioning statement should also list some of the other support-ing beneﬁts that characterise the complete employment offer. You shouldbe able to derive a number of these from the current reality positioning.The task in deﬁning your employer brand vision is to re-emphasise thesestrengths, address your weaknesses, and develop further qualities that willfurther increase your external appeal and drive higher levels of employeeengagement. As we described in Chapter 8, correlation analysis shouldhelp you to identify the factors that most drive employee engagementand this should be combined with your insights into the factors drivingattraction in the labour market.
Tesco provides a good example of an employer that has clariﬁed and
prioritised the beneﬁts that most appear to drive commitment to theorganisation. In Tesco’s case these are deﬁned as:
1.Trust and respect – The most important commitment driver for most
employees is having a positive relationship with their workmates and
manager.
2.An interesting job – The second most important commitment driver
for many is the degree of interest they ﬁnd in the jobs they perform.
3.The opportunity to get on – This relates to the opportunity to improve
on their current pay package and beneﬁts, and advance their career.Employer Brand Positioning

4.A boss who supports me – This relates to the general level of support
people receive in terms of communication with their line manager,
control over their workload, and opportunities for training and development.
Nationwide Building Society conducted a similar piece of research intothe most important drivers of employee commitment that led it to deﬁnethe following key beneﬁts:
1. Fair and equitable pay, based on regular performance reviews.
2. Coaching and development, including a focus on leaders and man-
agers as coaches and easy access to online advice, learning centres andcareer opportunities.
3. Effective resource management, reducing administration to create
more time with customers, and avoiding people feeling under- orover-stretched.
4. Pride and belief in the values of the organisation.
Compass Group is not only the world’s largest foodservice company, but
also the world’s ninth largest employer. Until recently Compass hadlargely grown through acquisition, with over 165 companies joining theGroup within the last 13 years. Two years ago the company switched itsfocus to organic growth, and set its sights on becoming known as a greatcompany, renowned as much for the quality of its people and service asit had been for its results – a self-styled journey from good to great. Akey element of this has been the development of an employment brandfor the Group, vital to attracting, developing and retaining the ‘great’people the company needs to deliver its vision and continue to be suc-cessful. With over 400 000 employees distributed across 90 countries, thisemployer brand proposition needed to be both simple to understand andcredible across a wide range of different businesses. The resulting propo-sition, arrived at through extensive research among its own employees, iscalled ‘great people, real opportunities’. This was supported by eight‘real opportunities’ reﬂecting the most important drivers of employeeengagement identiﬁed from a global survey involving 290 000 of their400 000 employees. These subcomponents of the overall proposition weredeﬁned as follows:
1. To have a great start.
2. To have work/life balance.124 The ‘How To’ Guide

125 Employer Brand Positioning
3. To learn and grow.
4. To be in the know.5. To make a positive impact.6. To be recognised.7. To share rewards.8. To share great ideas.
Each of these statements encapsulates a promise to deliver a positive
employee experience in relation to such key elements of people manage-ment as induction, ﬂexible working, learning and development, internalcommunication, recognition, reward and knowledge sharing.
Differentiators
Underline the features above that you believe will most differentiate theorganisation from others in the future.
EMPLOYEE VALUE PROPOSITIONS
While the above elements deﬁne the overall positioning of the employerbrand to all target groups, the question is how do you maintain employerbrand consistency without limiting your ﬂexibility to attract and retaindifferent types of employee? This is clearly an important considerationfor your employer brand strategy, because with many different types ofemployee to cater for (according to level, function, etc.) you will need tooffer more than Vanilla to compete in the job market and to grow andkeep the different kinds of people you need. These tailored ‘packages’ aregenerally described as Employee Value Propositions (or EVPs). The EVPis not just a tailored ﬁnancial package, but a summary of the other spe-ciﬁc beneﬁts promised to different target groups.
For a great example of how this can work in practice, visit the Microsoft
website, where you will ﬁnd a separate section devoted to each major careersegment.
7You will note that they all reﬂect the underlying ‘realise your
potential’ proposition, but tailor how this is expressed to each target group.
•Technical EVP :Make a difference – ‘A career at Microsoft offers you
the chance to be in the forefront of technological development,working with smart colleagues on meaningful projects. It’s an oppor-tunity to enjoy impact and ownership; your responsibilities have thepotential to leave a lasting technological legacy.’

•Marketing EVP :Your Impact Knows No Boundaries – ‘There’s a certain
satisfaction in knowing that your strategic marketing ideas help connect
technology to millions of people around the world. In a marketing careerat Microsoft, the possibilities of making an impact are limitless.’
•Human Resources EVP: Fulﬁllment Is the Catalyst for Achievement –
‘It’s an important mission bringing the right people in and takinggood care of them. It plays a critical role in helping Microsoft gener-ate technology that positively affects the lives of millions of peoplearound the world. This mission is also your opportunity to discoverjust how far your abilities, ideas, and skills can advance your career.In Human Resources at Microsoft, your big ideas matter and we wantto see them take you far.’
Reasons to Believe
The brand positioning model needs to be more than a brieﬁng note forbrand communication. It should also drive substantive change. An essen-tial discipline in testing the validity of the model is to list each elementin turn, and deﬁne the tangible reasons why employees and prospectivecandidates should believe them to be true. For the majority of the el-ements, this support should be ﬁrmly based on current activities, with aclear indication of what else the organisation plans to do to furthersupport the brand promise. There is room for some more stretchingclaims, such as a major new focus on innovation, in an otherwise rela-tively uncreative organisation, but only if it is clear that this internalbrand aspiration will be supported by a signiﬁcant effort to make it real.We will touch on this subject in greater depth in Chapter 11.
SUMMARY
1. The purpose of brand positioning statements is to deﬁne what your
brand currently stands for in the hearts and minds of your target audi-ences (the brand reality) and what you would like your brand to standfor in the future (the brand vision).
2. The nature and scope of your brand positioning models will depend
on its relative standing within the wider organisation (monolithic,parent or subsidiary).126 The ‘How To’ Guide

127
3. For brands that play a dual employee/customer facing role it is essen-
tial that the employer brand proposition and customer brand propo-
sition are fully integrated. Ideally, they should both reﬂect a ‘big idea’that can be expressed through every facet of the brand.
4. Your core employer brand proposition should provide a compelling,
relevant and differentiating ‘hook’ for communication and shaping of
the employment experience.
5. Just as different products and services exist within the portfolio of
most customer-facing brands, employee value propositions representthe tailoring of speciﬁc employment ‘packages’ to different targetgroups of employees.
6. Brand positioning statements count for nothing unless they are
founded on tangible and consistently experienced ‘reasons to believe’.Employer Brand Positioning

Employer Brand 10
Communication
While we have made it clear that there is far more to employer branding
than ‘sexing up’ your recruitment materials or running a series of ‘brand-wash’ events, brand communication clearly plays a vital role in helpingto improve people’s understanding and perceptions of what the organisa-tion has to offer.
IDENTITY
The ﬁrst subject to tackle is employer brand identity. Do you need tocreate a new name for the employer brand? We suggest that the answerto this question in most cases should be ‘no’. The integrity of the brandis vitally important to its credibility. While the brand may offer differ-ent propositions and beneﬁts to a range of different internal and externalaudiences, there should always be a common core. By developing a sep-arate employer brand name there is a danger of it being seen as an arti-ﬁcial gloss on the current reality, or a short-term initiative, rather thansomething of enduring meaning and substance.
There are some circumstances in which a new brand name may appear
to represent the most workable solution. In 2003, Allied-Domecqlaunched an employer brand called ‘Real Players’. The rationale for thisnew brand was that Allied-Domecq, with 500 subsidiaries in 50 coun-tries, was essentially a holding company ﬁnancial brand. While people inthe head ofﬁce work directly for Allied-Domecq, most employees aroundthe world work for other organisational brands, such as Hiram Walker in the USA. The purpose of launching ‘Real Players’ was to develop ‘a

universal language to describe values and behaviour’ and ‘to create shared
purpose’. While describing it as a global employer brand, ‘Real Players’was more like an ‘employee brand’. It described the employees whoworked within the Allied-Domecq group rather than their ultimateemployer. No one would ever say: ‘I work for “Real Players”.’ From ourperspective, by introducing this new brand name, the company missedthe opportunity to give the real global employer brand ‘Allied Domecq’fresh meaning and relevance. We would also suspect that most managerswill have regarded it as a campaign initiative rather than something oflasting meaning within the business. Visiting the Allied Domecq websiterecently I noticed that the People section leads with: ‘Our recentemployee opinion survey speaks volumes about the pride our people takein their brands,’ though clearly not ‘Real Players’. There was no mentionof it anywhere on the website.
An alternative route is to create a sub-brand, which can be used to
identify ‘employer brand’ communication materials. Unilever use thesub-brand ‘You’, which unlike ‘Real Players’, always appears under the main corporate logo. This device has appeared in all of its recentrecruitment advertising, and related internal brieﬁng materials. This neatplay on words provides a simple way of personalising the corporate, whileretaining the integrity of the core employer brand, Unilever. The nextstep, as the Unilever employer brand team recognise, is to ensure that themeaning of the employer brand is more fully embedded internally.
While Unilever’s simple and direct approach to sub-branding appears
to have been effective, we would generally recommend caution in intro-
ducing any further branding elements that might detract from the moreenduring core identity of the organisation. We believe this caution shouldalso extend to ‘branding’ the internal launch.
INTERNAL LAUNCH
Once you have sharpened up your employer brand proposition there isalways a great temptation to fast forward to an internal launch. Thedanger with most internal communication campaigns is that they tendto start with a bang, then fade away, to be superseded by the next cam-paign. Employees tend to be cynical about the latest ‘big initiative’ asthey tend to have seen many such initiatives come and go without reallychanging very much. In large organisations there can be many internal130 The ‘How To’ Guide

131 Employer Brand Communication
initiatives running concurrently, each with its own call to action, launch
pack and instruction guide. In many cases there is no obvious alignmentbetween the initiatives, and sometimes apparent conﬂict. As a result,most employees within big organisations tend to be overwhelmed interms of information and decidedly underwhelmed in terms of inspira-tion and engagement.
Brand engagement campaigns are particularly prone to cynicism.
Whether they come in the form of internal ‘living the brand’ marketing
exercises or CEO endorsed ‘vision and values’ or ‘culture change’, thereis often a distinct sense of unreality about them. They tend to paint acompelling picture of the future, but seldom feel rooted in the current,day-to-day realities of the business. They promise much, but generallyunderdeliver. You will probably have come across the phrase ‘sheep dip’;the sub-variant for brand engagement is ‘the brandwash’.
Bearing all of this in mind, launching an employer brand can be
fraught with difﬁculties unless it is carefully planned and executed.
Having spent the last 10 years running numerous large-scale engagementcampaigns, I think I can justiﬁably claim to have earned my bah, bah,black-belt in sheep dipping. The following represents my best advice inavoiding the pitfalls and launching something that will endure.
Our model for promoting brand engagement (Figure 10.1) involves
three principal elements: think, feel and do. We believe that launch
Context
Clarity
Relevance
Leadership
Dramatisation
Involvement
Substantiation
Consistency
ContinuityTHINK
FEEL
DORational
understanding
Emotional
engagement
Commitment
behaviour change
Figure 10.1 The brand engagement model. Source: People in Business

campaigns need to address all three with equal rigour to achieve anything
of lasting value.
RATIONAL UNDERSTANDING
For people to buy into the employer brand they ﬁrst need to understandthe context in which it is being introduced. Why is it being launchednow? What will it help the business to do? And what’s in it for them?The ﬁrst two questions should be closely interlinked. In our experience,employer brands need a strong business context to justify a major launch.The most typical examples of this are:
1. A major external brand relaunch, in which case the role of the
employer brand is to support the behaviour change necessary to
deliver the new brand promise. As we have stated in previous chap-ters, people will be a lot more likely to play their part in shaping anew customer brand experience if they experience similar values andbeneﬁts themselves as employees.
2. A signiﬁcant change in organisational strategy, restructuring, re-
engineering, downsizing, right-sizing, centralising, decentralising,
etc., in which case the role of the employer brand is to help to re-deﬁne the employees relationship with the new organisation.
3. A new corporate identity, in which case the role of the employer brand
is to imbue the visual redesign with deeper organisational meaningand relevance.
4. A merger or acquisition, in which case the role of the employer brand
is to help to establish a sense of shared purpose and identity.
Clearly, these contexts are not mutually exclusive, and often comebundled together in one major change project. The point is, they all rep-resent moments of truth for the organisation, with a requirement to re-deﬁne the ‘psychological contract’ between the organisation and itsemployees. We would regard this as an ideal opportunity to launch theemployer brand, as the role it plays in supporting the strategic objectivesof the organisation can be made immediately clear.
In the absence of signiﬁcant and tangible change, we would advise
against a major launch to employees. We believe that a more appropri-ate approach in this context would be a more targeted management brief-132 The ‘How To’ Guide

133
ing and commitment to improving those aspects of the employment ex-
perience that support the underlying employer brand proposition. Typi-cally this starts with a clearer recruitment advertising brief, though itcould involve many other elements of the employer brand mix discussedin the next chapter. In the absence of a burning need to support a majorchange initiative, we suggest that this more incremental, activity-basedapproach is likely to win greater support than a stand-alone, big banglaunch.
Whether you opt for a major launch, or take a more gradual approach
to introducing your employer brand to employees, the clarity and focus
of the communication is key. The overwhelming evidence from externalbrand research is to ‘keep it simple’. Consumers receive thousands ofbrand messages each day, and advertisers need to keep their core messagessimple and direct to cut through. While employees are sometimesregarded as a more captive audience, in reality they are just as likely tosuffer from information overload. Employer brand messages thereforeneed to be equally simple and direct. Ensure that you are absolutely clearabout the two to three core messages you want employees to consistentlyassociate with the employer brand, and put 90% of your attention intogetting these core messages across. This may mean sacriﬁcing some of themore detailed information you would ultimately like to communicate toemployees, but if you take the longer term view, as we will discuss shortly,it should be possible to build this up over time.
You not only need to be clear in your communication, you also need
to ensure relevance, and this starts with the language you use. As someof our early research with the London Business School revealed, the useof brand language can be anathema to many employees. This is not justa question of being cynical about marketing; it is more a question of beingcynical of jargon. Even in the context of a new customer brand position-ing, employees do not need to be familiar with brand jargon to under-stand the importance of reputation or delivering value to customers. Youwould never use brand jargon in communicating the beneﬁts of yourbrand to customers, so why use it with employees? While brand mar-keting tools are extremely useful in deﬁning howcommunication with
employees takes place, it is far more effective to frame what is commu-
nicated in terms that employees will more readily understand as relevantand meaningful to their everyday working lives. This ‘plain speaking’Employer Brand Communication

approach also tends to focus the mind on the substance of the brand
offering rather than the ‘wrapping’. Calling a spade a spade means youneed to make damn sure the spade is in good working order!
The clarity of the language you use becomes particularly important
when you are dealing with large numbers of employees for whom English
is a second language. Translating a core proposition into many differentlanguages can result in a lack of consistency. It can also be very expen-sive. Where possible it appears that most global companies use Englishto communicate the core proposition, but ensure that the languageremains clear and simple. This was one of the principal reasons forCompass Group choosing the phrase ‘From Good to Great’ in describingthe objectives of their global HR strategy and new employer brand proposition. As Tracy Robbins, the group HR Director for leadership and development, who played a signiﬁcant role in the programme, commented: ‘The phrase “good to great” was effective because of its uni-versality.’ Apparently the only countries in which they needed to trans-late this core message were China (where ‘great’ means ‘rich’) and Spain,where ‘great’ does not convey the power of the meaning intended.
The second aspect of relevance that lies right at the heart of the
employer brand concept is ensuring the relevance of the brand to theemployment experience. Many ‘living the brand’ campaigns focus almostentirely on how the employee needs to behave to deliver the desired brandpersonality and value to the customer. This is, of course, relevant in termsof the commercial objectives of the company, but it fails to address themore direct beneﬁts of the organisation’s brand values to the employee.Employees are far more likely to accept the organisation’s brand messagesif they experience the worth of the values for themselves. Taking a selec-tion of typical service brand messages to make the point, do the employ-ees of the hotel chain that claims to be ‘Always warm, always friendly’feel that way about their management team? Do the employees of aleading mobile phone company feel ‘connected’? Does the technologycompany that offers its customers ‘sense and simplicity’ ensure that itdelivers things in a user friendly format for its employees? I expect thatin many cases this is a constant challenge, and that the proverb of thecobbler’s children going without shoes captures the common experiencewithin many organisations.134 The ‘How To’ Guide

135 Employer Brand Communication
EMOTIONAL ENGAGEMENT
People may understand a message, but it makes little difference unless
they care. It strikes me that the difference between a product and a brandis much like the difference between an indifferent employee and a fullyengaged one. It’s all about the extra meaning and value that positive emo-tions bring to the equation. When people are fully engaged they will gothe extra mile, and in a highly competitive world, it’s the extra mile thatmakes all the difference. While we have already addressed the generalsubject of employee engagement in the previous chapter, it takes on amore speciﬁc aspect when it comes to internal communication. How doyou get people to engage with a new set of messages and ideas?
The ﬁrst principle of active engagement is that it requires active lead-
ership. There is nothing more engaging than personal contact withsomeone who is already highly engaged, particularly if that person hasthe power to shape the course of the organisation. It should be clearlyevident from the beginning that earning the reputation for being anemployer of choice, and delivering a consistently positive employee ex-perience, needs to be a personal mission of the CEO, not just good house-keeping. In most of the positive examples we have encountered, thiscommitment is crystal clear. Sir Terry Leahy of Tesco, Tom Glocer ofReuters, Michael Bailey of Compass Group and Steve Ballmer ofMicrosoft are leading examples of leaders who have provided this kind ofvocal, active and long-term commitment.
There is an enormous beneﬁt to be derived from the CEO going on
tour to carry the message directly to employees, as Chris Gent did soonafter bringing together the disparate family of local brands under theVodafone brand name. However, this can take a great deal of time and isoften impractical. The common alternative is for the senior team to sharethese responsibilities, and host a series of events designed to launch thekey messages, and brief people on the ensuing change plans. Where theorganisation is large and widely dispersed, the role of the senior team isoften to ‘light the ﬁre and fan the ﬂames’, by which we mean engage thenext management layer or two down, and then support the enrolment of‘ambassadors’ to carry the message out to the furthest reaches of the organ-isation. This can take an enormous logistical effort, and a fair degree of

courage. I recall the nervous apprehension before embarking on a sig-
niﬁcant internal brand roll-out for Barclays in the late 1990s. We weredue to brief the top 3000 managers on the bank’s new brand position-ing, running 17 events across four locations in the UK over a four-weekperiod. The delegates arrived at 6 pm in the evening for an introductorypresentation before dinner. This was followed by a full day’s activities,ﬁnally closing at 5 pm. We then had an hour to turn around, includinga ﬁnal brieﬁng session for the Barclays’ ambassadors involved in facili-tating the event, before beginning the process all over again with the next wave of delegates arriving at 6 pm. Even with carefully planningand a series of pilot sessions, this kind of intensive cascade always feelslike a tough mountain to climb. However, what it does ensure is thatpeople receive a consistent message and they receive it face to face fromthe leadership team.
A further beneﬁt of this kind of event is that it helps to dramatise the
key messages. As the 1960s media guru Marshall McLuan once said ‘Themedium is the message’, by which he meant the channel through whichsomething is delivered often communicates as much as the content of themessage itself. In the context of an event, the fact that it is being stagedoutside the normal business premises, and delivered personally by a seniorleader within the business, signals that the message is important. The fact that many otherwise separate groups of people have cometogether to participate in the event signals that it is a message designedto bring people together. In the Barclays case, these brand engagementsessions were one of the ﬁrst initiatives to bring together people fromboth the retail bank and the business/corporate bank. These factors helpto dramatise some of the underlying messages that the organisation wantsto get across. The very act of ‘staging’ an event for a large group of peoplealso helps to imbue the messages with drama. People on stages act dif-ferently to when they are in small brieﬁng sessions. People within largegroups also respond differently. It’s the difference between watching foot-ball on the television and experiencing the match live in the stadium.There is a quantum leap in atmosphere (as long as the performance is upto scratch!).
Film can also deliver a more powerful effect on a big screen, and a well-
constructed dramatisation of the brand messages on ﬁlm can be highly
engaging. From our experience the general quality of corporate videos has136 The ‘How To’ Guide

137
improved dramatically over the last decade, and many have been designed
to deliver maximum impact on the big screen. The ‘talking heads’formula, by which I mean senior managers providing context and pledg-ing commitment to the cause on video, is really a small screen format.What has become far more common is for employees to be used in moredramatic situations to get the message across, and for the senior managersto ensure that they deliver their messages face to face (which communi-cates far more powerfully than any statements they may commit to video).The best recent example I have seen of this was not corporate at all, itwas a video made by the west London Council of Ealing that delivers local government services to a population of 300 000 residents and 10 000 local businesses. In support of a major programme of internal transformation called ‘Making a world of difference’, it produced a 5-minute video which sought to communicate the essence of what theywere trying to achieve to their 7500 employees. This was used in a wide-ranging programme of internal brieﬁng and engagement events that havenow touched the vast majority of their employees. Now you’re probablythinking that a local government video is going to be pretty dry andimaginative. Well, think again. To dramatise the core proposition of‘Making a world of difference’ they based the video on the story of ‘It’s aWonderful Life’. If you haven’t seen the ﬁlm, it’s an all-time classic. Itfeatures Jimmy Stewart as a well-meaning, regular guy who devotes hislife to serving the local community as the manager of the local bank.Faced with almost certain bankruptcy, he contemplates suicide, butangelic intervention gives him an opportunity to return to his local townto see what it would have been like if he had never been born. Duringthis return visit he begins to realise the true value of the many small actsof kindness that have characterised his life. I won’t spoil the ending,sufﬁce to say it makes for a compelling story. What Ealing did was toﬁlm different groups of employees telling the story to each other whilegoing about their daily activities. What the ﬁlm dramatised, in a gentlyhumorous but also very moving way, was how the thousands of small dailyactivities carried out by the Council’s employees contribute towards thecommunity’s collective quality of life. The ﬁlm was both highly im-aginative and down to earth. It highlighted Ealing’s service propositionwhile, at the same time, celebrating the vital role of employees in con-tributing something of real value to people’s lives. The next time youEmployer Brand Communication

consider a ‘talking heads’ video to launch an internal brand message,
think again about whether the level of creative imagination involved isgoing to do justice to the message you’re trying to get across.
Even with the most inspirational of leaders, the most dramatic of
venues and a brand video shot by Ridley Scott, you may still be lacking
one vital ingredient in fully engaging your audience. Fortunately it istends to be a rather less expensive ingredient. The most effective engage-ment tool is active audience participation and involvement. Probably themost successful brand vision event I was ever involved in organising didnot take place at a swanky conference venue nor did it involve a long androusing opening speech from the company President (though he wasthere). It took place in a large, empty warehouse. The ﬁrst task of the dayinvolved the 200 participants constructing and painting the conferenceset, and then planning and designing the agenda from scratch, in onehour. There’s nothing like a challenge to get people engaged. The under-lying message centred on the organisation setting out to achieve whatappeared to be unachievable, together and fast. The senior team didn’thave all the answers, but they were clear on the ambition to build one ofthe biggest brands in the UK. The set was built, the agenda was deliv-ered and the organisation was Walkers Snack Foods.
While this kind of interactive ‘event’ tends to involve audiences of
between 50 and 300 people, new technology has facilitated some inter-esting developments in mass participation events. When Reuters set outto win internal support for their Living FAST programme they leveragedtheir technical expertise to the full to involve over 15 000 employees inone interconnected, global, 24-hour event. To build interest prior to theevent, this exercise also involved an online ‘issues audit’, which providedevery employee with the opportunity to raise challenges that they feltneeded to be addressed. These issues were then clustered into 23 chal-lenges that were picked up by different teams around the world duringthe course of the main event. This helped to reinforce the point that theroll-out process was not just designed for the leadership team to broad-cast their intent, but also to listen, share and respond to employees’ con-cerns and suggested solutions. (See Reuters case study, Appendix 1, formore details.)
IBM’s ‘Jam Sessions’ have been equally bold in scope. Described by one
media commentator as ‘the business world’s Woodstock of online collab-138 The ‘How To’ Guide

139
oration’, IBM’s ﬁrst ‘WorldJam’ held in 2001, involved 52 000 employees
in a 72-hour online conference to discuss 10 major cross-company issues.The event generated a signiﬁcant number of new ideas and encouragedinteraction across the company in a way that would have been impossibleofﬂine. This event has subsequently been followed up by a ‘ManagementJam’ focusing on leadership issues and a ‘Values Jam’ seeking input on therelevance and vitality of the organisation’s core principles.
Employee involvement need not require a major event. Some of the
most powerful engagement techniques involve relatively simple exercises
that can be conducted in relatively small brieﬁng sessions. As any ex-perienced facilitator will tell you, the trick in getting people to boththink and engage is not to provide all the answers but to ask the rightquestions. As Nicholas Ind puts it in his useful guide to ‘Living theBrand’: ‘The real challenge here is to change a manager’s mindset awayfrom an approach that focuses on selling an idea to others in the organi-sation to a more organic method, which following the planting of a seedof an idea, grows through the involvement and enthusiasm of others.’
1
The power of this approach was brought home to me during the processof conducting a long series of internal workshops introducing Unilever’snew Code of Business Principles. While I believe, as you will gather fromthe Ealing example, that well-constructed brand stories can help to illustrate key messages, the most engaging approach is to present open-ended scenarios. We used both in communicating Unilever’s core princi-ples, but time and again, the more powerful of the two approaches indelivering engagement and emotional buy-in were the scenarios. The fol-lowing insert provides an example of one of the scenarios we used toexplore the principles of ‘business integrity’ and ‘fair competition’.
Scenario – Taking a Lead
•The marketing director of Avanta is approached by a talented but dissatis-ﬁed young brand manager from its main competitor Besto.
•Agreeing to an interview, the marketing director is interested to discover thatBesto is planning a major new relaunch.
•He asks his team to keep an eye out for any further information that mightindicate when the launch is due.
•An eager sales representative manages to uncover Besto’s media schedule, care-lessly left on a trade customer’s desk.Employer Brand Communication

•The marketing director pre-empts the Besto relaunch with a major price pro-
motion and signiﬁcantly spoils its impact.
•Should the marketing director be congratulated?
The underlying point of these scenaria was to demonstrate that organ-isational values and principles are seldom black and white. While theyare generally easy to understand at face value, they are often far harder toapply in the real world. On the page, values and principles appear obviousand absolute, but the real world is full of conﬂicting pressures, trade-offsand compromises that can make ‘values’ appear unrealistic (and too oftenirrelevant). It would be inadvisable, if not impossible, to create a rulebook covering every conceivable situation in which a value or principlemay need to be applied, so you have to communicate the spirit and essenceof the value, and rely on people to make active judgements. By provid-ing people with true to life dilemmas, you can help them to explore andinterrogate the values for themselves, and in doing so, shift the contextof the communication from receiving instruction, to taking personal ownership.
In the above example, should the marketing director have agreed to
the interview if there was no suitable vacancy available? At what point
between an innocent slip of the tongue and aggressive interrogationwould the principle of integrity have been betrayed in discovering Besto’srelaunch? Should the marketing director have shared this knowledge?Should the marketing director have been more speciﬁc in describing whathe meant by ‘to keep an eye out’? At what point between taking note ofa poster on the wall through to uncovering a partially obscured documenton the customer’s desk would business integrity have been compromised?If the document had been ‘uncovered’ from someone’s private desk, shouldthe information have been acted on? After prompting discussion of thesequestions with the group, some general guidelines were provided on thedeﬁnition of conﬁdential material, the difference between private andpublic domain and the legal interpretation of soliciting for trade secrets.However, without any prompting the crux of most discussions focusednot on the legal constraints to action, but the ‘real’ meaning and value ofbusiness integrity in the pressurised commercial world of day-to-daybusiness. To give an indication of the level of engagement that this sce-nario-based approach achieved, the senior team of the Latin American140 The ‘How To’ Guide

141
Business Group set aside two hours to cover what clearly appeared to them
at ﬁrst a cut and dry subject. The workshop lasted six hours, into theevening. They spent over an hour on the single scenario featured above.
EMPLOYEE COMMITMENT AND BEHAVIOUR CHANGE
There is a simple, well-known phrase that every business leader shouldtake to heart in making internal brand promises: ‘Actions speak louderthan words.’ From our perspective there is one very important differencebetween emotional engagement and commitment in the context of in-ternal communication. Short term engagement can be bought with brandpromises, but longer term commitment and behaviour change can onlybe earned by ensuring that those promises are substantiated.
Substantiating employer brand promises is much harder graft than
making them. It sometimes appears that senior management teams think
that the job is done when the brand message has been delivered andreceived, as though the organisation will suddenly transform itself havingseen the light. But people will only believe the brand messages, and beginto change their behaviours if they begin to see tangible evidence from thetop that the brand proposition and values are being hard wired into thefabric of the organisation, changing the way in which processes are runand important decisions are taken.
When Greg Dyke was Director General of the BBC he initiated a major
programme of culture change called Making it Happen . This was sup-
ported by a restatement of the BBC’s core values and a well coordinated
series of internal events, including ‘Just Imagine’ and ‘The Big Conver-sation’. These mass participation exercises shared much in common withthe Reuters’ June 11 event and IBM’s ‘Jam Sessions’ described earlier.While extremely successful in promoting employee engagement, GregDyke believes the most powerful ‘moments of truth’ for the change pro-gramme were connected to actions not words. When I saw him speak onthe subject at the Work Foundation in 2004, he mentioned two actionsamong many that he claimed reinforced commitment to the change pro-gramme more than anything else. The ﬁrst was moving the BBC Newsfrom 9 pm to 10 pm. This may not appear to be much of a change, butthe 9 o’clock News had been a central feature of the BBC’s schedule for decades. Previously it was felt it would have taken 12 months of Employer Brand Communication

consultation and study papers to even begin to consider such a move.
Within the new regime it was agreed and executed within two weeks,and reinforced the message that the BBC could be both decisive anddynamic. The second symbolic action was more humdrum in somerespects, but nevertheless felt to have been equally signiﬁcant. The BBC’sWhite City ofﬁce was a fairly ugly building with only one really attrac-tive feature, the central atrium. The problem was that employees had beendisallowed from using the atrium for the last 14 years, though nobodyseemed to understand why. The reason, it turned out, was Health & Safety.The atrium needed a wheelchair ramp and second ﬁre exit, but previousattempts to ﬁx the problem had apparently proved ‘too difﬁcult’, and wereabandoned. While only a minor aspect of the overall change programme,ﬁxing this problem and the opening up of the atrium to staff provedimmensely symbolic. As Greg Dyke commented in his book Inside
Story:
The opening up of the White City atrium became an incredibly important
story around the BBC. It symbolised what ‘Making it Happen’ was trying todo and helped convince people things could be changed. It showed the staffthat the Director General was on their side in attacking the mind-numbing
negativity of the BBC bureaucracy. It also told the jobsworth bureaucrats
that we were after them.
2
From such actions are employer brand reputations transformed, though
whether this battle was ultimately successful at the BBC is doubtful.
In the next chapter, on brand management, we consider this kind of
substantiation in terms of the employer brand ‘mix’. The concept of themix in marketing refers to the complete range of elements that shape thebrand experience. They are sometimes called the ‘touch-points’, which isanother way of describing how people’s perceptions are derived from hun-dreds of different meetings with the brand. In the context of the employerbrand there is perhaps more control over the communication touch-points, but there are also far more experiential touch-points than for youraverage customer brand.
Brand trust is generally based on brand consistency. Substantiation of
the brand promises plays a key role in this, but it is also important tokeep the brand message consistent. There is a tendency for internal pro-grammes of brand engagement to be treated as a discrete stream of com-142 The ‘How To’ Guide

143
munication, unconnected to other subjects and sources of management
information. If you take an employer brand perspective this does not holdup to close inspection. From the employee’s perspective, all your internalcommunication has the potential to reinforce or undermine how peoplefeel about the company. This means that you are unlikely to build trustand credibility in your employer brand unless you deliver a degree of con-sistency across all of your communications.
Vodafone provide a very good example of this. Their core values are:
‘passion for our people’, ‘passion for our customers’, ‘passion for per-
formance’, and ‘passion for the world around us’. They have consistentlyused these core values to frame a multiplicity of internal initiatives thathave helped both to reinforce their saliency and substantiate them overtime.
Another key area of focus is the consistency between internal and ex-
ternal communications. Don’t forget that your external communication(including both recruitment and consumer advertising) can also sendpowerful messages to your employees about the kind of company you run,or claim to be running. You need to make sure your employees feel thatthese external promises are credible before you over-promise to customersor new recruits. Failing to consider the employee perspective, as in theSainsbury’s case (page 10) can be disastrous. On the other hand, closelyinvolving your employees in the development of an external advertisingcampaign, as the Halifax have proved, can be an all-round winner. TheHalifax conducted an internal competition involving over a thousandemployee auditions in eight regional casting sessions to choose the newface of the bank. The resultant winner ‘Howard’ has subsequently provedto be immensely popular with customers and employees alike.
The ﬁnal point on consistent communication is maintaining continu-
ity over time. How do you continue to reinforce the same underlyingmessages while keeping it relevant and fresh? This is a major issue withinbrand management on which we have already commented in Chapter 6.Brand communication requires constant creative attention to ﬁnd newways of dramatising brand messages. This should not mean changing thecore messages, but ﬁnding fresh ways of expressing them and buildingthe story. Just consider some of the longest running UK advertising cam-paigns. Stella’s ‘Reassuringly Expensive’ campaign has been running for over a decade, but still manages to create impact with each new Employer Brand Communication

execution. It’s like the difference between launching a movie and launch-
ing a TV series. If you launch your employer brand as if it’s a movie, withlots of fanfare and a big event, it can seem as if all the excitement is overonce you leave. ‘Well I’ve seen that movie what’s next?’ If you think ofit more like a TV series, the dynamics are different. You establish thedramatic context, introduce the key characters, develop some interest andthen you build.
The communications campaign that Nationwide Building Society used
to support the introduction and embedding of its PRIDE values, provides
a good example of this approach. The original launch in 2002 introducedall ﬁve values:
Put members ﬁrst (Building Society’s refer to their customers as
‘members’)
Rise to the challenge
Inspire conﬁdence
Deliver best value
Exceed expectations
Subsequent to this the plan has been to keep all ﬁve values in mind butto highlight a different value each year. In 2003 the emphasis was placedon ‘Inspiring conﬁdence’ in support of a focus on leadership behaviours.In 2004 the emphasis was placed on ‘Delivering best value’, supportedwith a challenge issued to the organisation to drive for greater efﬁciency.This has enabled Nationwide to maintain the relevance of the valueswithout repeating the same story year on year.
SUMMARY
1. Communication plays a vital role in shaping people’s understand-
ing and perceptions of the employer brand.
2. In communicating the employer brand it is generally counter-
productive to introduce additional branding elements that may detract from the more enduring core visual identity of the organisation.
3. We suggest that employer brand engagement campaigns should
only be launched in association with other substantive changes144 The ‘How To’ Guide

145
within the organisation or repositioning of the external corporate or
customer brand.
4. To promote internal commitment to your employer brand it is
important to establish both a strong rationale and appeal to the emo-
tions of your employees.
5. Applying brand thinking and marketing tools to people manage-
ment does not mean that you need to use brand jargon in your com-munication. It’s no more relevant to your employees than yourcustomers. You should focus on the beneﬁts, not the underlyingmethodology.
6. Avoid the temptation to over-claim for dramatic effect. To ensure
that your communication is credible, it’s better to focus on what is
already on offer, or soon to be available, rather than focus on autopian vision that feels far removed from current reality.
7. Don’t forget that your external communication (including both
recruitment and consumer advertising) can also send powerful messages to your employees about the kind of company you are, orclaim to be. Make sure your employees feel that external brand communication is credible before you over-promise to customers ornew recruits.
8. Take the long-term view and be careful not to position employer
branding as a campaign initiative. You know you wouldn’t succeed
in the marketplace by treating your external brand communicationas a short-term initiative. By the same standards, you shouldn’texpect to succeed in building a strong employer brand by puttingall your emphasis on a big bang launch and then neglecting tofollow through.
9. Recognise that from the employees’ perspective, all your internal
communication has the potential to reinforce or undermine howpeople feel about the company. You are unlikely to build trust andcredibility in your employer brand unless you deliver a degree ofconsistency across all of your communications.
10. Don’t’ forget the ‘body language’ of the organisation. People pay far
more attention to what is done than what is said. Look for ways ofsymbolising your intent through tangible actions, including atten-tion to managers who feel that, as successful business ‘operators’,they are exempt from the brand values.Employer Brand Communication

Employer Brand 11
Management
It is one thing to establish the nature of your employer brand – what it
is and what it needs to be to achieve your business objectives – but it isquite another to ensure that it is managed with the same care and coher-ence as you would a customer brand. If you fail to put in place the man-agement systems and the senior management support for them, then thewhole employer brand initiative may wither and result in nothing morethan some tinkering with recruitment advertising.
A good example of the application of these skills can be found at
Orange, where David Roberts (employment brand and communications
manager), while an HR staff member, sits alongside Orange’s marketingand advertising team. His job is to make sure that the people aspects ofthe Orange brand are correctly managed in the £50 million that Orangespends a year in the UK and, similarly, to ensure that consumer-facingwork ﬁts with the reality of the employment experience. Orange uses theiremployer brand to drive the market understanding of themselves asemployers and to make sure that their communications in this ﬁeld areconsistent and compelling. They regard the Orange employer brand asan internal catalyst to drive initiatives that will ensure that Orange is agreat place to work. They realise of course that it is much more than com-munications and they are using the Orange employer brand to drive theinternal change they need to ensure that every relevant aspect of theemployment experience ‘does what it says on the tin’.
To this end there are four signiﬁcant roles that must be coordinated
within Orange HR. These are the head of physical environment, the headof employment and engagement (covering diversity, private surveys, etc.),

the head of compensation and beneﬁt and the head of HR business deliv-
ery, which provides all Orange businesses with the traditional HR ser-vices they need. The aim for this is to ensure that the Orange employerbrand is realistic, desirable and unique and is the result of extensive in-ternal and external research and the necessary internal change relation-ships that it has prompted.
An interesting hurdle that Orange employer brand management has
to overcome is what they call Orange Shock. That is the term they use
for potential disconnect that can exist between the young funky style ofOrange in the marketplace and the detailed processes, heavy demands andserious commitment that the now vast organisation regards as essential.While David Roberts reports to the Head of Resources, his ultimatebosses are the Vice President for HR and the Vice President for Market-ing and Branding. It is a good example of employer brand coherence.
Another example is PepsiCo UK, for years regarded as a top HR house,
where the PepsiCo ‘Umbrella’ delivers a common purpose, a common
identity and common values across the HR processes in businesses asvaried as Walkers Crisps, Tropicana, Quaker and Pepsi itself. CamilleBurrows is organisational and management development director forPepsiCo UK and when Simon Barrow ﬁrst heard her speak at an employerbrand event he was struck by the thought that she could just as easily bea marketing executive. Interestingly, before her HR work she startedbusiness life in a recruitment company and one thing recruitment peoplehave to possess is a sense of opportunity and service delivery which makesthem good salespeople. HR and employer brand management demandmuch broader skills, but this early experience deﬁnitely helps. LikeOrange, PepsiCo UK have done their homework on people’s motivationsand commitment to the company. PepsiCo is an organisation in which,however well you have done, there will always be a greater goal and overtime these seemingly endless ‘false summits’ have become a signiﬁcantmotivational issue. In response they have highlighted the need forstronger management recognition of the efforts made by individualswithin a very demanding company. This PepsiCo research has not led tosigniﬁcant change in organisational development or compensation andbeneﬁts, but it has resulted in changes to people’s attitudes and behav-iours. This could only have been achieved with the full and proactive148 The ‘How To’ Guide

149
commitment of Martin Glenn, the president of PepsiCo UK, who some
years earlier had commissioned me to conduct the ﬁrst ever employerbrand project for Walkers Snack Foods.
What particularly struck us about PepsiCo is that given the long-
standing commitment to people processes from the top, the company does
not seem to have any of the historic baggage of the Human Resourcesfunction. They were totally at one with the objectives and strategy of thebusiness. Nevertheless, Camille’s message for employer brand managersis ‘you have to be brave enough to state what is right and stick to yourguns’.
While there are a growing handful of employer brand manager job titles,
it is our view that any good HR function with strong senior management
involvement and support is perfectly capable of managing the employerbrand. The speciﬁc title can help when, as in Sainsbury’s case, there was aneed to demonstrate that the coherence of brand management was a seriouspart of the organisation’s intent. The term ‘brand management’ does com-municate joined-up-ness, and that is the heart of this approach.
To help both in assessing your current employer brand reality, and
planning how to deliver the employer brand proposition you desire going
forwards, we have developed a list of 12 key dimensions which we referto as the employer brand mix (Figure 11.1). We divide the 12 areas intotwo broad groups, the ﬁrst relating to wider organisational context andpolicy and the second local context and practice. Each of these elementsrepresents key ‘touchpoints’ for the employer brand.
BIG PICTURE: POLICY
External Reputation
There is often a close relationship between the employer brand image of
a company and the reputation of its goods and services. It is generallyassumed that an organisation that is capable of delivering a good ex-ternal brand experience is also likely to be a good quality employer. Thesame can be said of companies that are known to be ﬁnancially success-ful. Employees are understandably proud of working for organisationsthat are well known and well spoken of externally. It provides people withEmployer Brand Management

recognisable status (particularly on the CV) and a positive image that they
will be more likely to advocate and live up to in their interactions withexternal parties.
It is always worth bearing in mind that employees will probably pay
as much, if not more attention to your external marketing than yourtarget customers. If handled well this can provide your organisation witha boost to employee engagement in addition to any further beneﬁts youderive from improving your external brand image and driving sales. Inthis context, you should make sure your employees are well briefed onany high-proﬁle marketing activities. Employees should understandwhat, if anything, is expected of them to support new promises or claims.If, as is increasingly common, your advertising incorporates ‘employees’(actors or otherwise), you should make sure that this representation is wellresearched internally as well as externally. Are they credible role models,or merely dancing to the tune of the advertising message? In the Sains-bury’s example discussed in Chapter 1, the lack of respect shown to theemployee featured in the John Cleese advert was a major cause ofemployee disaffection. Likewise, employees can also feel disaffected bypromises they know will be difﬁcult to fulﬁl. A recent campaign run bythe oil company Total featured a perfect employee called Steve who spendshis whole time running around the forecourt helping customers withheavy loads, childcare, and car maintenance, with the tagline: ‘You’ll ﬁnd150 The ‘How To’ Guide
Big Picture: PolicyLocal Picture: PracticeExternal
reputation
Working
environmentReward and
recognitionInternal
communication Recruitment
and induction
Values
and CSRPerformance
appraisalTeam
management
Learning and
developmentSenior
leadership
measurement
systemInternal
s Service
supportEmployer Brand
Proposition
Figure 11.1 The employer brand mix. Source: PiB

151
people like Steve at all of our service stations.’ Apart from being less than
totally believable to customers, this kind of advertising can put animmense strain on employees. Unless it is well backed by training andadditional support, it is far more likely to undermine their image of theorganisation than enhance it.
Negative external coverage should also be well briefed internally as
employees will often be asked their opinion. Employees are likely to be
even more disaffected by bad news if they feel they know less than thenewspapers. It is the natural tendency of most employees to defend theirorganisations, but they need the information to do so. Journalists willtypically take the most negative view of circumstances. It is thereforeimportant to make sure that employees are well briefed on the widerpicture, including full and open recognition of any mistakes that havebeen made, so that they are in a strong position to respond to these‘moments of truth’.
Just as an effective product or service brand manager has a role to play
in championing the customer’s viewpoint, the role of employer brandmanagement is to ensure that the employee’s viewpoint is always takeninto consideration in the development of external corporate or marketingcommunication.
Internal Communication
As we made clear in Chapter 10, all internal communication should be regarded as employer brand communication, as every piece of com-munication says something about the organisation. While a number ofleading companies are beginning to coordinate their internal communi-cation more effectively, it is still more typical for different functions anddivisions to ‘do their own thing’. From the employees’ perspective this islikely to lead to perceptions of information overload and incoherence.
The role of brand management is to champion a more coherent and
employee-centric view of internal communication. This involves a degree
of ‘air trafﬁc control’ to ensure that major communication efforts don’tall try to land at the same time. It also involves a smarter approach tocontent management. Are the most signiﬁcant corporate messages beingconsistently reinforced? Does the style of communication consistentlysupport the desired values and personality of the organisation? Is thereEmployer Brand Management

sufﬁcient feedback and monitoring to ensure that the desired messages
are getting through?
Senior Leadership
Of all the potential sources of communication, the leadership team has oneof the most critical roles to play in both reinforcing the credibility and con-veying the ‘spirit’ of the employer brand. Effective leadership is also oneof the most powerful drivers of employee engagement. This has been cor-roborated by many benchmark studies, particularly ISR’s three-year globalemployee engagement study published in 2002, which identiﬁed ‘qualityof leadership’ as the foremost driver of employee commitment.
1This does
not necessarily mean that leaders need to spend all their time directly
talking about the employment proposition, but it should inform the stylein which they communicate, and how they structure their messages toreinforce the desired relationship between the organisation and its employ-ees. The way in which the organisation’s leaders behave will be equallyimportant. The majority of employees have very well-honed bullshitdetectors, and will spot the merest hint of false sentiment or managementcliché if what is said deviates from the reality of their observations. WhenGreg Dyke starting sending e-mails to all employees with the sign-off‘Yours Greg’, it signalled a more direct and personal style of leadership atthe BBC. However, the symbolism of this gesture only gained credibilitywhen it was noticed that his behaviour followed suit, such as taking hisplace in the lunch queue in the staff canteen (a noticeable departure fromprevious Director Generals of the BBC). The leadership team, particularlythe CEO, has a signiﬁcant role to play in not only communicating theproposition but also embodying the employer brand and its associatedvalues in everything they say and do.
The role of employer brand management in relation to the senior lead-
ership team is to ensure that they are constantly made aware of the impactof both their words and actions in shaping employees’ perceptions of theorganisation.
Values and Corporate Social Responsibility
Following the growing interest in CSR over recent years, there have beennumerous studies into the effects of good practice in this area on employee152 The ‘How To’ Guide

153
engagement and commitment. When the Work Foundation and the
Future Foundation conducted a study to examine the impact of CSR onthe employer brand they reported that 20% of employees found employ-ers with a positive socially responsible image more attractive.
2They also
noted a strong positive correlation between companies that are seen to
take their responsibilities towards society seriously and those seen as agood employer to work for. In a similar study conducted by the Cor-porate Citizenship Company it was concluded that community involve-ment improves employee morale, motivation and the propensity of peopleto recommend their company to others.
3
Two of the most important employee-related aspects of corporate
responsibility are diversity and work–life balance. The diversity agenda
of most leading organisations now extends well beyond ‘equal opportu-nities’. It has begun to encompass a more far-reaching respect for indi-vidual differences in all their forms. Vodafone’s statement of diversitypolicy is typical of this more positive attitude to diversity in claiming:
We believe that diversity is a key driver of creativity, leadership and inno-
vation …W e are seeking to build a culture that respects the value of dif-
ferences among us and encourages individuals to contribute their bestwithin an environment that is inclusive, open, ﬂexible and fair.
4
Likewise, Unilever states:
Diversity at Unilever means more than physical diversity – gender, nationality, style, race and creed. It’s about us – creating an environmentthat inspires different individuals to contribute in their own different wayswithin a framework of shared values and goals.
We strongly believe in creating an environment which fosters creativity
and engenders powerful team commitment – an environment where differ-ences are valued and where people can fully realise their true potential.
5
In many respects, a commitment to work–life balance represents a
natural extension of this philosophy, in that it encourages people to ﬁnd
a balance in their lives which allows them to perform at their best. InChapter 3 we made reference to the negative effects of stress on manypeople’s working lives, and this is one of the principal ways that organ-isations are beginning to address this issue. Leading commentators havenoted that, work–life balance is fast becoming a highly signiﬁcant com-ponent in becoming an ‘employer of choice’. As Mike Johnson puts it inhis book The New Rules of Engagement :Employer Brand Management

People – your employees – have come up with a different way of looking at
it. It’s called life–work balance. Life ﬁrst, work later. And this is what is goingto drive the new social contract between employer and employee.
6
In this context, an organisation’s CSR activities should be regarded as an
important element within the employer brand mix, and not simply anexercise in ‘doing the right thing’ or bolstering the external corporatereputation.
Internal Measurement Systems
Our research into organisations with strong employer brands has repeat-edly reinforced our belief in the maxim ‘what gets measured gets done’.At the Nationwide Building Society, where levels of employee satisfac-tion and engagement in their annual ‘Viewpoint’ survey have beenimproving consistently for some years, the CEO Philip Williamson hasmade a habit of taking a direct interest in low- and high-scoring branches.This has made a signiﬁcant impact on both raising the ﬂoor and theceiling of people management performance. The transparent approachthey take to their 360-degree evaluations has also been recognised as asigniﬁcant spur to self improvement. We discovered a similar picture atTesco where the local version of their balanced scorecard (the SteeringWheel) is regularly posted on the staff notice board. In both cases employ-ees are assured that the company takes its proposition to employees seri-ously enough to measure it, publicise it and act on the results.
Service Support
The quality of the service support that employees receive internally –either when they need something urgently to satisfy a customer, or whenthey need help in responding to something more personal – represents acritical moment of truth for the employer brand. In organisations wherethe employee is principally regarded as either a worker drone or channelfor getting the brand to market, the emphasis tends to be placed onschooling employees on what they are expected to deliver for the cus-tomer. This can provide a clear sense of alignment and customer focus,but there is a natural tendency for employees to question the authen-154 The ‘How To’ Guide

155
ticity of the brand and its supposed values if it doesn’t resonate with their
own experience of the organisation. I recall one employee from a heavilyadvertised service brand commenting:
They are expecting us to be fast and efﬁcient in terms of what we deliver to
customers but where is the speed and efﬁciency when it comes to thingsthat we want as employees? How can they expect us to be responsive tocustomers, when they are totally unresponsive to us?
This is one of the more difﬁcult areas for employer brand management
to address since it cuts across functional divides, and is often deeply rooted
in the current culture of the organisation. Nevertheless, poor perform-ance in this area can totally undermine the organisation’s efforts topromote brand engagement. No amount of internal communication onthe brand or customer focus will make up for the disengagement that canresult from employees feeling devalued by their own experience of work.
LOCAL PICTURE: PRACTICE
Recruitment and Induction
Recruitment is seldom regarded as a transaction by new employees, but
it often appears to be treated that way by employers. As we suggested inChapter 9, brand managers tend to focus on the process of building alasting brand relationship rather than simply signing up new customers,and they are aware that a customer’s ﬁrst experience of a brand representsa vital stage in creating a positive and enduring connection. How oftencan this be said of the recruitment and induction process? It tends to bewell stage managed for graduates and senior recruits, but what abouteveryone else?
The recruitment process is also increasingly being tailored to identify
the types of people who will have a natural afﬁnity with the organisa-
tion’s brand values. For example, the recruitment process Lego developedwith Kaisen started with a web questionnaire that quickly identiﬁed andscreened out people who did not have the right ‘ﬁt’ for the job and theLego brand.
7For example, in subsequent Face to Face interviews, when
asked to describe a customer, naturally empathetic candidates – thosewith a better ﬁt to the brand – tended to talk about the customer’s feel-ings and emotions, while less well-suited individuals just gave hard facts.Employer Brand Management

In terms of current employer brand practice most of the emphasis tends
to be on recruitment, but from a brand management standpoint the
induction process is equally important. This represents a golden oppor-tunity to dramatise the character of the organisation, what it expects ofits people, and what in turn the individual employee can expect from theorganisation. It’s an opportunity for which any passionate marketer wouldpay a large premium if it concerned a potentially valuable customer, butin actual internal practice it too often appears to be squandered.
Team Management
In the many recent studies that have explored employee engagement, thebehaviour of local management is generally recognised as a vital successfactor. In the engagement study conducted by IES the strongest driver ofall was ‘a sense of feeling valued and involved’ and the quality of theemployee’s immediate management was identiﬁed as critical factor inbringing this about.
8This echoed previous research conducted by ISR
which listed the people management skills of an employee’s immediatemanager/supervisor, and an employee’s feeling of empowerment to carryout work effectively as two of the most important drivers of employeecommitment.
1InThe W ar for Talent study conducted among middle and
senior managers, Michaels et al. found a similar pattern of response.9
While they noted that different people prefer different kinds of corporate
culture, they also found that nearly all managers look for ‘an open, trusting environment’. This was particularly noticeable among youngermanagers (Generation X), who rated a ‘good relationship with my boss’ as one of the most important elements in driving their career de-cisions. On a more negative note, many other studies have continued toreinforce the observation that people ‘join an organisation, but they leavetheir boss’.
From a brand management perspective, the day-to-day quality of local
management plays just as important a role in shaping the employer brandexperience, as the front-line customer representative plays in shaping theexternal brand experience (and, as we have sought to demonstrate, thetwo are intimately linked). This demands an involvement in leadershipdevelopment and training. Does it support the behaviour required todeliver the employer brand proposition and high levels of employee156 The ‘How To’ Guide

157
engagement? If not, this will represent a major weakness in the long-
term credibility and sustainability of the employer brand.
Performance Appraisal
One of the regular features we encountered in researching successfulemployer brands was the extent to which the core values of the organ-isation were embedded in the performance management process. At bothReuters and Nationwide we found that this was regarded as one of themost important factors in grounding the values in people’s everydaybehaviours. As John Reid-Dodick of Reuters observed, when you havespent several days evaluating people in terms of value-based behaviours,and been evaluated yourself in terms of your own performance in prac-tising the values, then you begin to develop a much deeper sense of whatthose values mean in everyday practical terms.
Whether this occurs successfully depends of course on the quality of
the process, and how rigorously it is applied at a local level. Are people
clear about what is expected of them and how they will be judged? Is theappraisal properly prepared for by both appraiser and employee? Arepeople prepared to deal with poor performance?
In terms of clarity, we regard the guidance provided by Greggs plc, a
leading UK retailer specialising in sandwiches, savouries and other bakeryproducts, as exemplary (Appendix 3).
Learning and Development
Learning and development represent vital components of the employerbrand offering. They inﬂuence both the organisation’s general attractive-ness to new recruits and its ongoing ability to maintain high levels ofemployee engagement.
In ISR’s global commitment study (2002) ‘development opportunities’
were identiﬁed as the second most important driver of employee commitment, only marginally behind the leading factor ‘quality of lead-ership’.
1In ISR’s more recent global study (2004) they identiﬁed career
development as a cornerstone of employee engagement in nearly all of the10 countries they studied.
10Likewise, in the IES study on employee
engagement (2004), training and development was rated as the mostEmployer Brand Management

important inﬂuence on whether employees felt valued, involved and
engaged.8
When Marks & Spencer researched its employer brand it noticed an
interesting pattern in the data. People who had received training withinthe last six months were 19% more satisﬁed than those who had notreceived training. One of the most interesting aspects of this study wasthat recent training also appeared to deliver a ‘halo effect’. Employees whohad received training within the last six months were generally more sat-isﬁed with all aspects of the employer brand, not just development.
While research ﬁndings are consistent in identifying the importance
of training and career development to employee engagement and the
strength of the employer brand, there is just as much evidence to suggestthat most employees feel that their employers could do a great deal moreto improve their offering in this area.
In 1999, a global study conducted by the Career Innovation Research
Group among over 1000 young professionals concluded that: ‘These
people have an overwhelming desire for personal and career development– for a “development contract” (to match the “performance contract”) –yet their experience rarely matches their expectations.’
11A more recent
study by TNS suggests that little has changed over the last ﬁve years.They found that from the employees’ perspective, 70% of US companiesare failing to deliver sufﬁcient opportunities to learn, grow and develop.
12
Our experience suggests that the situation in the UK will probably besimilar despite the continued efforts of such organisations as Investors in People to raise the proﬁle of training and development as a key performance-enhancing investment. Since this aspect of the employerbrand mix appears to be generally weak, developing a more robust ‘devel-opment contract’ represents a signiﬁcant opportunity for organisations to both differentiate their employer brand and drive higher levels ofemployee engagement.
Development does not, of course, stop with the exit from the company.
We believe that a key question for anyone considering joining an organ-
isation is to ask about the success of people who have left the companyand moved on. Alumni are often the ﬁrst port of call for people check-ing out your organization, and throughout their careers they will betalking about their time with you. Yet few employers regularly keep intouch with their alumni and many have only the most rudimentaryprocesses for managing any kind of ongoing relationship. Try calling a158 The ‘How To’ Guide

159
switchboard and asking for someone who has moved on. More likely than
not you will be told ominously that so and so is ‘no longer with thecompany’. There is often also a tone of voice that implies that somethinghas gone wrong. Our own view is that if an organisation cannot list thenames of people who have gone on to great things then it is likely toreﬂect badly on the employer brand.
Reward and Recognition
As the authors of The W ar for Talent pointed out: ‘While it takes more
than money to build a winning EVP [Employee Value Proposition], ifyou don’t stay competitive with the market price for the best managerialtalent, you’ll have a hard time.’
9Just as the pricing of your services to
customers requires constant attention and updating, the ﬁnancial dimen-sion of the employment package is always going to provide a baseline forthe brand.
While reward is a major symbol of recognition it is only one of
many. Survey after survey reveals that recognition is one of the most criti-
cal factors in employee motivation. Feeling valued (particularly for dis-
cretionary effort) is a critical factor in employee engagement, andrecognition. Whether through prize giving or incentive schemes, or ageneral management tendency to offer praise for work well done, recog-nition is one of the simplest and most direct ways of demonstrating thatpeople matter.
For Compass Group, recognition was identiﬁed as one of the most pow-
erful drivers of employee engagement in their global employee survey,and they found a creative way of incorporating this into their employerbrand roll-out by featuring professionally shot portraits of employees whohad ‘gone the extra mile’ in their internal and external (recruitment) cam-paign materials. We hope that, by featuring a number of these portraitson the front cover of this book, we have also played a small part of ourown in contributing to this recognition.
Working Environment
In a discussion with a communications manager from BT we were inter-ested, though not surprised, to discover that the quality of people’sworking environment appeared to be a signiﬁcant factor in determiningEmployer Brand Management

how they responded to BT’s recent values programme. Employees
working in modern, well-furbished ofﬁces tended to be far more positivethan those working in some of their older, less well-appointed sites. Therewere undoubtedly other contributory factors in this case, but our generalexperience suggests that people’s working environment represents animportant manifestation of the employer brand. It still appears that manyorganisations pay little attention to the working environment over andabove the basic logistical and HSE necessities. In comparison, leadingemployer brands like Microsoft, Vodafone, Reuters and Hiscox go to greatefforts to shape the ofﬁce environment to reﬂect the core values and per-sonality of the organisation. In Microsoft’s case, this meant managing thewall space in public areas as carefully as they would high-proﬁle externalposter sites. For Vodafone it meant designing their new headquarterscampus in Newbury with two of its core values ‘ Passion for our people ’ and
‘Passion for the world around us ’ very much in mind.
13
From our perspective, the 12 items shown in Figure 11.1 and discussed
above are the most important elements to be considered within the
employer brand “mix”, but it is far from an exhaustive list. In additionto ensuring that the total mix is consistent with your overall employerbrand proposition and values, the mix can also play an important role indifferentiating yourselves from your competition. Just like the dimen-sions of a consumer product or service, each organisation must determinethe elements that are going to help its employment experience to reallystand out for the people it most needs to recruit and retain.
THE KEY RESPONSIBILITIES OF EMPLOYER
BRAND MANAGEMENT
From our perspective there are ﬁve main roles to be performed by the
person or people tasked with developing the employer brand strategy andensuring its effective ongoing management.
•Establishing the nature of the employer brand required by the organ-isation to achieve its business objectives.
•Crafting an effective employer brand positioning and winning seniormanagement involvement and approval for the resources and culturalchanges that are necessary to make it a reality.160 The ‘How To’ Guide

161 Employer Brand Management
•Managing the communications necessary to reach the target audiences
internally and externally.
•Developing a good working relationship with the many differentmanagers whose decisions and behaviours will most shape the con-stituent parts of the employer brand mix.
•Tracking the right employee measures and facilitating managementdiscussion on the performance gaps remaining between the currentand desired employer brand experience.
Introducing a systematic approach to employer brand managementshould not cost the organisation more than good HR management. Itneed not necessarily replace anything you’re doing well already, butsimply help to bring the parts together to greater effect. On the contrary,as we argued in Chapter 7, effective employer brand management shouldresult in signiﬁcant savings in recruitment and retention, and promote amore engaged and productive workforce.
While many professional HR Directors should be capable of taking up
the challenges we have described, a number of organisations are begin-ning to appoint ‘employer brand managers’ whose main remit is to co-ordinate between functions. Many of the current people who hold thistitle have moved into HR from marketing, or vice versa. Either way the individual must be a change agent, and command respect across the board for their integrity, energy and ability to listen. Brand managementis about diplomacy and the art of the possible, and certainly not a role for the faint-hearted. Just as brand management transformed the wayin which marketing was organised, we believe employer brand manage-ment can enhance HR’s contribution to the business and the careers ofthose within it. We strongly believe that it is potentially the most attrac-tive role in HR and indeed what HR should be about. But then we arebiased!
SUMMARY
1. Building a strong employer brand requires more than consistent
communication of the promise. It also requires careful and coherentmanagement of the many different elements that shape employees’everyday experience of the brand.

2. There is no ideal template for an employer brand. An employer brand
needs to be shaped to match the objectives and the resources of the
organisation.
3. The employer brand ‘mix’ refers to the wide range of constituent el-
ements that shape people’s employment experience. These can be
divided into two groups, relating to wider organisational context andpolicy, and local context and practice.
4. Every element within the employer brand ‘mix’ should reﬂect the
underlying proposition and values and reinforce the desired brandexperience.
5. Introducing a systematic approach to employer brand management
disciplines should not cost more than good HR management.
6. Employer brand management is a task that most HR functions should
be capable of performing in close conjunction with their counterparts
in Marketing and Communication. However, a number of organisa-tions have found it useful to create a speciﬁc employer brand man-agement role to coordinate these cross-functional efforts.
7. As the following case studies demonstrate, employer brand manage-
ment is not for the faint-hearted, but as we have also consistently
found, fortune favours the brave!162 The ‘How To’ Guide

The Durability of the 12
Employer Brand Concept
Many new management disciplines have risen to prominence over the last
20 years. The pattern is now familiar. First there is the seminal bookheralding a new dawn of management effectiveness. Consultancies appearon the market with well-packaged implementation programmes. Thereare a ﬂurry of articles, conferences and guidebooks featuring competingmodels and pioneering case studies. In some cases there may even be anawards programme. Then, just as people are settling down to await theresults, the ﬁckle wheel of management fortune takes another turn, andthere’s a new game in town. Is employer branding, therefore, just anotherfad? We certainly don’t believe so, and I would like to close this bookwith three fundamental reasons why we believe the discipline of employerbrand management is here to stay.
1.Organisations increasingly recognise that they cannot take the commitment
and loyalty of their employees for granted – Despite the desire to ensure that
employees are broadly satisﬁed with their working conditions, it haslargely been taken for granted that if you give people a decent job theywill gratefully do your bidding. This view is increasingly at odds to thegrowing reality of employment. Leading companies are beginning torealise that valued employees, like proﬁtable customers, are free to makechoices, to join, to engage, to commit, and to stay. They are also begin-ning to realise that to attract the right kind of people, to encourage themto remain loyal and to perform to the best of their abilities requires amuch more focused, coherent and beneﬁt-led approach than has gener-ally been provided in the past. Given the long-term trend for organisa-tions to treat their valued employees more like valued customers, webelieve that the logical conclusion for most will be to sharpen up the way

in which they manage the brand that these people work for – the
employer brand.
2.Employer branding provides an effective commercial bridge between HR,
internal communications and marketing – People management has long been
the poor cousin of marketing management, with HR regarded by many
organisations as an administrative cost centre rather than as a vital com-ponent in the creation and delivery of business value. This is fast chang-ing. Most businesses have woken up to the vital importance of recruiting,retaining and developing the right people. The service sector, particularly,has woken up to the fundamental importance of engaging employee com-mitment in delivering customer satisfaction and loyalty. The growingcommercial emphasis of these activities is bringing HR and internal com-munication practice increasingly in line with the approaches and disci-plines more commonly applied to the creation and delivery of externalvalue – namely, marketing and brand management.
3. Employer branding draws on a discipline that has proven lasting value
in the marketplace – Branding and brand management have evolved over
time, but the central tenets of the discipline – that is, close attention tothe needs and aspirations of the target audience, focus on beneﬁts, com-petitive differentiation and the marshalling of a coherent and consistentbrand experience – are as central to brand management today as they haveever been. The foremost reason why employer branding is here to stay isthat, in driving and sustaining people’s commitment and loyalty, therehas been no more effective approach than brand management. No doubtit will involve a further evolution in brand management practice. Webelieve that HR has as much to offer marketing as marketing has to HR.Both sides can learn, both sides will beneﬁt, and if, as we believe, thegreatest net beneﬁt will ultimately be to the business, then employerbranding will be here to stay.
Mihail Gorbachov’s ambassador to London once commented that ‘glas-
nost and perestroika are doors that will never be shut’. Simon and I wouldlike to believe the same will be true of the Employer Brand.164 The ‘How To’ Guide

Part III
Appendices

Appendix 1: Reuters Case Study
Following the announcement of its ﬁrst ever year of loss in 2003, Reuters embarked
on a three-year process of transformation called Fast Forward. The people-focusedworkstream within this programme, dubbed ‘Living FAST’, sought to redeﬁneemployees’ perceptions of the organisation and drive a new way of working. While notreferred to by Reuters as such, we believe that Living FAST bears all the hallmarksof an effective employer brand programme, with a focused employer brand proposition,core values, integrated delivery framework and consistent brand management.
History
Reuters is one of the few high technology communication companies that can trace its origins to the mid-nineteenth century. Julius Reuterlaunched the business in 1849 to transmit stock prices between theGerman town of Aachen and Brussels in Belgium, using the most versa-tile long-distance communication device of the day – the carrier pigeon.Despite being better known to the public as a news agency, 90% ofReuters’ revenue is derived from its ﬁnancial information and transactionsservices rather than its supply of news and pictures to the world’s media.With 15 000 employees working in almost 100 countries, Reuters sup-plies information, analysis and trading tools to nearly half a millionpeople in the ﬁnancial markets worldwide.
The Business Context
Reuters experienced signiﬁcant growth through the 1980s and 1990s onthe back of stock market deregulation around the world. While stockmarkets boomed, there was an apparently insatiable appetite for Reuters’

trading systems and information products. By the end of the 1990s,
coupled with strong regional autonomy and undisciplined diversiﬁcationinto new product areas and technology platforms, this growth had trans-lated into a sprawling and highly complex organisation. If all appearedreasonably well in a booming market, the picture looked signiﬁcantly lessattractive when the global economic slowdown began in early 2000. Toprovide some insight into the state of the organisation at that time,Reuters was offering over 1300 products on a multitude of different tech-nical platforms, while its principal global competitor, Bloomberg, wasselling just one product on a single technical platform. In a marketplacethat was increasingly demanding global consistency and ease of use,Reuters found itself in a highly vulnerable position, and as the economytightened, Reuters’ share price duly plummeted.
Taking the Lead
In June 2001 Reuters appointed a new Chief Executive, Tom Glocer, witha clear remit to turn the situation around. Tom Glocer was an internalhire. Having previously held the position of CEO Latin America, andthen CEO for the Americas, he knew Reuters well. He described theReuters he joined in 1993 as ‘a confederation of sovereign city-statesrather than a uniﬁed company’. While he was clear from the start thatReuters needed to make some tough ‘structural’ decisions to survive, hewas also sensitive to the danger of destroying the ‘special fabric’ thatdeﬁned so much of value within the Reuters’ culture. The course thatTom Glocer followed over the next three years reﬂects this combinationof hard-headed, rational pragmatism and emotional intelligence thattends to distinguish effective leaders.
The Organisational Change Programme
While the primary focus of this case study is the Fast Forward Programmethat began in February 2003, the process of change that was initiated fol-lowing Tom Glocer’s appointment represented an important stage inReuters’ transformation from a devolved and highly fragmented organ-isation to a highly focused and more consistently managed ‘employerbrand’. The Organisational Change Programme (OCP) that was initiatedsoon after Tom Glocer took over as CEO established four global customer168 Appendices

169 Appendix 1: Reuters Case Study
segments, restructured the geographic business units into sales and service
channels, and integrated the main business support functions, such astechnical development, product management and marketing, into globalcentres of excellence. Soon after this re-engineering was achieved, themarkets turned down and Reuters was forced to embark on its ﬁrst evermajor redundancy programme, with 3000 of Reuters’ 19 000 employeeseventually losing their jobs between June 2001 and early 2003.
Culture and Values
Despite these cost reductions, Tom Glocer’s sensitivity to the ‘specialfabric’ of Reuters’ culture meant that a signiﬁcant amount of manage-ment time and effort went into redeﬁning the company’s core values inthe context of the new organisational realities. This process had startedback in April 2001 with an international conference for 90 senior man-agers. Prior to the conference, all of the participants had been providedwith the results of an employee research exercise comprising a quantita-tive survey and focus groups. While this provided important insights intothe issues that mattered most to employees, the approach taken to deﬁn-ing the values was more of a creative than an analytical exercise. As JohnReid-Dodick, the leader of the OCP’s ‘People’ workstream commented:‘We’re a story telling culture, and that’s how we approached the values.’Groups of managers were asked to recount stories from the organisationthat they felt characterised Reuters at its best and worst and to capturethe essence of those stories in a word or phrase that they then wrote in‘behavioural bubbles’. The positive stories and ‘bubbles’ that resonatedmost strongly with the participants as a whole were then crafted into draftvalues. Following an additional period of research during which thesevalues were further explored, tested and reﬁned with groups of em-ployees in each region, seven values were launched at the senior manage-ment conference held at the end of 2001.
Barbarians at the Gates
The launch of these values was closely interlinked with the OCP’s harderedged structural changes. In the context of the ﬁnancial marketplace inwhich ‘all hell was breaking loose’, it is worthy of note that one of thehighlights of this conference was a presentation made by Steven Bungay,

a management consultant and military historian afﬁliated with Ashridge.
This began with the opening scene of ‘Gladiator’. For the non-ﬁlm buffsamong you, this scene pits an embattled Roman Army against a Germanic barbarian horde, with the former wielding their superior dis-cipline and ﬁre power to devastating effect to claim victory. StevenBungay then explained how some (not all) of the values and practices ofthe Roman Army were relevant to Reuters if it was to survive in anincreasingly hostile business environment. This included such insights asthe Roman Army’s ability to soak up innovative new tactics, tech-nologies and ﬁghting talent from different parts of the world and rede-ploy the best of them wherever they operated. It cast a whole new lighton the objectives and aspirations of OCP . It may have been a particularlybloody metaphor, but it was highly impactful, and effective in makingthe point.
Integrating the Internal and External Brand
The values presented at the end of 2001 served to provide the leadershipteam with a number of important ‘anchor-points’ that needed to be keptin mind as the OCP took hold, but there was no overt communication ofthese values to the rest of the organisation at this stage of the changeprocess. The emphasis at this point, as John Reid-Dodick, Head ofOrganisational Development, put it was ‘doing stuff that demonstratedthese values’, rather than ‘pounding people over the head with them’. Atthe same time the ‘internal values’ work was being conducted, the ex-ternal Reuters brand was also receiving attention. While the Reutersbrand was well known it was generally agreed that the positioning of thebrand in the marketplace lacked clarity and the company’s marketingcommunications lacked impact.
Research conducted in 2002 among Reuters’ key customers had helped
to generate a list of external brand values for Reuters that were both desir-able and credible. Fortunately, these were ‘not dissimilar’ to the internalcultural values, but nevertheless there was enough of a difference to createpotential confusion among employees. With the aspiration to create oneuniﬁed set of internal and external values, the brand and culture teamscame together, and in January 2003 ﬁnally ‘knit them together, word forword’.170 Appendices

171
‘Fast Forward’
While some progress had been made during 2002 in restructuring and
downsizing the organisation, the economic climate had continued toworsen, and on 17 February 2003, Reuters announced a loss of £493million, the ﬁrst full-year loss in its history. In response, Reuters’ CEO,Tom Glocer, told the ﬁnancial analysts that he was accelerating the busi-ness transformation with a three-year change programme called ‘FastForward’.
‘Fast Forward’ contained ﬁve business change workstreams which
aimed to continue and further sharpen many of the initiatives already under way in the OCP , such as product simpliﬁcation and reduc-tion of the cost base. But, as Tom Glocer made clear, the challengeinvolved ‘much more than changing our architecture. It means changingthe Reuters culture as well’. To give this substance, Tom Glocer established a sixth workstream, ‘Living Fast’, which would seek to deﬁnewhat Reuters would come to mean to its employees, in terms of corevalues and ways of working. Recognising the critical importance ofbehaviour change in delivering the other workstreams successfully, Tom Glocer also announced that he would take a direct role in leading‘Living Fast’.
Distilling the Values
Less than a month after the announcement of the ‘Fast Forward’ pro-gramme, Tom Glocer convened a two-day meeting of the company’s top100 managers with culture change as a central focus. Tom hand-picked20 of these senior managers to be part of a workshop that he would leadto deﬁne the core values that would underpin ‘Fast Forward’. After theﬁrst day, this team had reﬁned the list of integrated brand and culturalvalues created a few months earlier to a shortlist of six. Tom thendemanded even more focus and simplicity, with a reduction of the short-list to three core values. These were agreed to be: ‘Speed’, ‘Account-ability’ and ‘Teamwork’. When these were presented to the plenary groupthe following day, the feedback called for a more explicit focus on cus-tomers, so the team agreed to add ‘Service’ and recommended a ﬁnal listof four core values, as follows:Appendix 1: Reuters Case Study

•Fast – Work with passion, urgency, discipline and focus.
•Accountable – Be clear on performance, responsibilities, rewards and
consequences.
•Service-driven – Understand customer needs and exceed expectationsthrough personal commitment.
•Team – Share, challenge and trust.
Given the neat alignment of the ﬁnal values with the overall ‘FastForward’ programme it may come as some surprise that the Reuters teamdidn’t start with the acronym FAST, and retroﬁt the values. According toJohn Reid-Dodick, who was closely involved in facilitating much of theculture workshop, this is not the way it happened. The ‘eureka moment’only hit the team on the second day when they were integrating the focus on customers and decided to replace ‘Speed’ with ‘Fast’ and to add ‘Service-driven’. With the team gathered around, Tom Glocer thenworked with David Schlesinger, one of the company’s most seasoned jour-nalists who now heads up global editorial operations, to make the ﬁnalversion as simple and as memorable as possible.
The ‘Living FAST’ Framework
With the values deﬁned, Tom Glocer then put together a team to deﬁnea ‘Fast Forward’ workstream called ‘Living FAST’ that would activate andembed the FAST values. This team was made up of functional experts,including the global heads of organisational development, people devel-opment, employee communications, and strategy, as well as high-potential business unit and regional representatives. One of the ﬁrstoutputs from this team was the ‘Living FAST’ framework (Figure A1.1)which deﬁned the relationships between the different elements impact-ing on employees’ experience of the values.
Building on this conceptual framework, a plan was then developed
which deﬁned the key phases that the team believed would be requiredto activate and then embed ‘Living FAST’.
Mobilisation
With so many redundancies over the preceding period, morale was gen-erally low, and the ‘Living FAST’ team knew there was an urgent need to172 Appendices

173 Appendix 1: Reuters Case Study
refocus employees on the active part they could play in securing a more
positive future for Reuters. It turned out that the seed for this broaderengagement had been planted at the senior management conference inMarch. Participants had left feeling highly energised and committed, and had been sharing their enthusiasm with employees in their businessunits as part of a planned communications cascade. In response, employ-ees began asking how they could experience directly what had happenedat the management conference.
To capitalise on this interest, the ‘Living FAST’ team considered
various options, including a ‘management conference’ for a group of morejunior employees or a global roadshow, but they decided that these wouldnot reach enough people or would take too long. Then one of the membersof the ‘Living FAST’ steering group, head of employee communications,Anne Marie Bell, ﬂoated a more radical approach. This entailed pickingCOMMUNICATIONSMETRICS
CHANGECAPABILITIES
BENCHMAR KINGCULTURA L DRIVERS
HR BUSINESS PROCESSES
Staffing & Selection • Resource Planning
Organisational Design • HR Shared Services • Mobility, Diversity and InclusionRewardLearning and
development
Talent
management
Performance
management and
assessmentFormal
recognition
Global roles
frameworkInformal business
practices
TeamsCEO’s
agendaPersonal
accountabilitySymbols /Heroes
Stories /Language
Living
FAST
Figure A1.1 The ‘Living FAST’ framework. Source: Reuters (2004)

one day in June during which every Reuters employee would be given
the opportunity to experience what was meant by ‘Living FAST’ andactively participate in making the transformation of Reuters a success.Initially dubbed ‘Follow-the-Sun’, the concept involved running a highlyinteractive and interconnected event, beginning on one side of the worldwith the rise of the sun, and following the sun from one time zone to thenext for 24 hours, picking up every Reuters’ site and employee along theway.
Anne Marie Bell recalls taking this idea to the steering group, and
saying: ‘I have this crazy idea. It’s so crazy that it just might work.’ The
‘Living FAST’ team loved the concept but were initially hesitant abouttaking on such an enormously difﬁcult task. As the meeting progressed,and the team unpicked each of the knotty problems that they believedthey might face, it began to dawn on them that it just might be poss-ible to pull it off. The idea was taken to Chris Verougstraete, the GroupHR Director, who was enthusiastic about an outreach to all em-ployees and gave it his endorsement if they could secure the budget. Theﬁnal call was then made by Tom Glocer. Anne Marie Bell recalls sendinga note which read something along the lines of: ‘I think this could be areal turning point. We need a million pounds to do it. If you think I’mcrazy, you can ﬁre me.’ Tom Glocer’s answer was short and to the point:‘Go do it.’
The Dream Team
In late April, with only six weeks’ lead time, but the full support of theCEO, the ‘Living FAST’ team asked senior managers from around theworld to nominate some of their highest potential people to the task. TomGlocer sent out an invitation, and with ﬁve days’ notice a diverse groupof high performers was gathered in London to explore how the ‘Follow-the-Sun’ idea could be delivered. The task was spelled out on the ﬁrstmorning of the two-day workshop. Given that the response was gener-ally one of incredulity and insecurity (what if it all goes wrong?), it wasagreed that if by the end of the ﬁrst day the assembled team still felt itwas going to be impossible, then they would cancel the undertaking andthink again. The participants worked on the task until midnight, break-ing the challenge down into its component parts, and brainstorming174 Appendices

175
potential solutions. By the close of the ﬁrst day there was no question of
turning back. By the end of the second day the team had a detailed imple-mentation plan covering timings, logistics, roles, responsibilities andestimated costs.
Chris Verougstraete, the new Group HR Director who had joined
Reuters a month previously as an expert in change management, came
along to the workshop at the end of the second day and was ‘simply blownaway’ by what the team had produced. Chris helped to sell the plan tothe leadership team the following Monday, and ‘June 11’, as the eventsimply came to be known, was on.
Preparing for ‘June 11’
As soon as the ‘Dream Team’ members returned to their business units they were tasked with creating a network of volunteers who would help to plan and run the ‘June 11’ event locally. These local effortswere coordinated and supported by a section of the new ‘Living FAST’ website called ‘In the Know’. There were also numerous confer-ence calls arranged, one of which was led by Tom Glocer himself. With the active involvement of the CEO and the ‘buzz’ around the event growing day by day, hundreds of employees volunteered to take anactive role.
To further engage employees prior to the event, Reuters also launched
an ‘Issues Audit’ on the ‘Living FAST’ website, designed to enableemployees to log any issues that they felt required management atten-tion. This proved to be a highly popular initiative with over 1900 issueslogged on the site in the weeks leading up to the event.
‘This is One for the Books on How to Communicate’
The ‘June 11’ event, beginning in Australia and ending in California 24hours later, comprised six core components:
1. A multimedia opening event hosted by senior managers to introduce
employees to ‘Fast Forward’ and the FAST values.
2. A cross-functional ‘Living FAST’ session in which all 15 000 em-
ployees got together in groups of 10–15 people to identify speciﬁcAppendix 1: Reuters Case Study

ways that the company as a whole, and they as individuals, could help
to embed the FAST values.
3. A functional team-based session focused on tackling the 23 most sub-
stantial issues generated by the issues audit. This session, called ‘Tom’s
Challenges’ involved managers choosing the challenges they wouldaddress with their teams, ranging from reducing e-mail overload,running more effective meetings through to bigger organisationalissues, such as promoting the Reuters brand more effectively.
4. An internal news channel created by Reuters’ in-house television
experts, featuring 20 hours of programming, 94 scheduled liveappearances, including Q&A sessions with Tom Glocer, and 80 pre-recorded items.
5. A variety of fun and social activities, many of which raised money for
charities supported by the company’s charitable fund, the Reuters
Foundation.
6. 150 stories ﬁled to the ‘Living FAST’ website, edited by a Reuters’
journalist working in the employee communications function.
Even with a tightly scheduled framework, detailed facilitation guidelines,
a backbone of pre-recorded ﬁlm clips and regional piloting of some of thecore components, the event largely relied on the local senior managersand ‘Living FAST’ volunteers to bring it all together on the day. Itworked. There were no major technical glitches. The TV anchorman,Steve Clarke, a seasoned network TV professional, led 14 hours of the 20hours’ programming. The interactive sessions generated both heated dis-cussion and productive output. And, very importantly, the event wasclearly enjoyed by the majority of those participating. It lifted people’sheads from the painful redundancies, and refocused them on building acompany that will protect the remaining jobs. It re-ignited people’s pridein the company (‘one of the few companies in the world that could pullthis kind of event off’). It rebuilt conﬁdence in a management team thatwas clearly prepared to both invest in its people, and take the time tolisten to them.
The following e-mail from a senior executive who had recently joined
Reuters from one of its competitors, where he had been CEO, gives someimpression of the response:
I just wanted to say that you achieved something really incredible yester-
day. To attempt to pull off the technical feat alone was brave, but to deliver176 Appendices

177 Appendix 1: Reuters Case Study
a substantial program that pulled together an entire 15,000 strong global
company was just awesome.
Message, delivery, collaboration, energy and motivation were all on target.
This is one for the books on how to communicate. Thank you for a greatday, you should be proud. I believe there are thousands around the worldwho, thanks to your efforts, were proud to see the company and its capa-
bility on display.
Responding to Employee Input
The issues audit and subsequent ‘June 11’ workshops had invited the
points of view of every Reuters’ employee, but as anyone who had participated in this kind of listening exercise will tell you, judgement isgenerally suspended until these points of view receive a considered management response. Tom Glocer was clear on this requirement, anddemanded that every issue receive a response within 3 weeks. The ﬁnal issue bank containing 3400 items of employee feedback was postedon the ‘Living FAST’ website, and each issue was given a number and assigned a manager as the ‘accountable owner’ responsible for posting a written response by the deadline. The response had to resolvethe issue immediately, set out a clear rationale for why it would not beaddressed, or provide an appropriate plan of action for how it would beresolved over time. This was a tough process to complete. As one of theresponse coordinators commented: ‘it felt like we were a snake trying todigest a porcupine’. Nevertheless the three week promise was delivered.Moreover, as a tangible demonstration of the ‘accountable’ aspect of theFAST values, managers who had proposed plans of action had to reporton progress over the following months, and that progress was rated onthe ‘Living FAST’ website as either ‘green’, ‘amber’, or ‘red’ until it wascompleted.
While at times the audit exercise felt to those involved like ‘boiling
the ocean for a cupful of salt’ it was recognised as having played an invalu-able role in enthusing people for the ‘June 11’ event. The fact that theaudit was completely open and uncensored helped to reinforce the honestyand integrity of the programme, and generated an enormous amount ofinterest in the goals and ongoing progress of ‘Living FAST’. Such was thepopularity of the issues audit that, when it was ﬁnally closed down, manypeople requested a more permanent channel for raising and discussingissues. The result was the reconﬁguration of an existing intranet channel,

‘TalkBack’, providing a new ‘one stop shop’ for raising issues and sharing
ideas.
The Main Effort Plan
In mid-July 2003, Tom Glocer again had the ‘Living FAST’ team convenea group of high potential employees, this time to use the ‘June 11’ feed-back to develop a clear and well-founded plan of action for driving culturechange in the company. In advance of the two-day meeting, each participant was provided with a synopsis of the principal themes thatemerged from the issues audit and was encouraged to review the issuesand responses on the ‘Living FAST’ website. Recognising that culturechange on the scale required could only happen over time, the group wereasked to identify a small number of company-wide priorities and todevelop a ‘main effort plan’ to phase and sequence those efforts under thebanner of ‘Living FAST’.
The group worked late into the night on the ﬁrst day to prepare their
recommendations for Tom Glocer, who joined them for three hours the
following morning. He engaged in a spirited exchange – asking detailedquestions, exploring alternative points of view, and encouraging thegroup to keep things as simple as possible. Noting the company’s ten-dency for complexity and fondness for acronyms, Tom at one point jokedthat the group’s challenge was to come up with a plan that would avoidemployee ‘MYGO’ (‘My eyes glaze over’). The result was the Main EffortPlan (Figure A1.2).
This plan identiﬁed four distinct phases, each with a small number of
core deliverables. The ‘Things are Changing’ phase had begun with ‘June11’ and evolved further by engaging employees through improved man-agement change capability and broader communications efforts. Thesecond and perhaps most challenging phase was ‘Getting Simpler’, whichsought to clarify business unit objectives and link them more directlywith individual objectives; to create a simpler and more aligned organ-isation; and to help employees to gain a much better understanding ofwho does what in the organisation. The ‘Knowing Our Customers’ phasewas to enable employees to better understand Reuters’ business, whichstraddles the media, technology, and ﬁnancial services sectors, and toimprove customer service by enhancing the quality of service that178 Appendices

179 Appendix 1: Reuters Case Study
employees themselves experience from the company. The ‘Working
Smarter’ phase sought to integrate the FAST values into plans to consoli-date most London-based employees into a single location in Canary Wharfduring 2005, and to focus on achieving greater collaboration amongemployees globally.
MANAGING THE ‘LIVING FAST’ BRAND
While ‘Living FAST’ originated as a workstream within the wider ‘FastForward’ programme, it soon became clear that it had the potential tobecome a powerful focus for employees’ relationship with the ‘new’Reuters that they were now engaged in building. It was decided at anearly stage to develop a distinct look and feel for ‘Living FAST’ andproduce guidelines that would help to ensure that the ‘Living FAST’brand was carefully managed to retain its clarity of focus and maximiseTHINGS ARE
CHANGING
Delivering on
June 11
Building change
capability
Laying the
communications
foundationsImplementing
performance
management
Simplifying the
organisation
Clarifying
individual roles
& responsibilitiesKnowing
Reuters
Delivering internal
customer serviceCanary
Wharf
CollaborationWORKING
SMARTERKNOWING OUR
CUSTOMERSGETTING
SIMPLER
Figure A1.2 The Main Effort Plan. Source: Reuters (2004)

its impact. In this context, strict rules were applied to how the brand
could be applied. Managers were dissuaded wherever possible from usingthe new ‘Living FAST’ identity to liven up their business-as-usual com-munications (particularly following the success of ‘June 11’). This helpedto ensure a clear distinction between the old ways and the new and main-tain the integrity and meaning of ‘Living FAST’.
This required a major overhaul of the internal communications infra-
structure. Following ‘June 11’ the internal communications function was
centralised and rationalised to ensure greater global consistency. Whilestill ‘embedded’ in the regions and local units, the internal communica-tions function began to be managed as a global team. While this initiallymet with resistance from the local line management, they soon realisedseveral clear beneﬁts in addition to the more consistent management of‘Living FAST’. There was less ‘noise’ in the internal communicationschannels. The issues audit had surfaced a general dissatisfaction with thevolume, inconsistency and multiple layering of the previous communi-cations infrastructure. Tighter management from the centre meant fewer,more consistent and more clearly constructed messages. Working as aglobal team also meant that Reuters could leverage its coverage acrosstime zones more effectively. The Daily Brieﬁng, an online internal newsupdate, was previously criticised for being too static and too UK centric.The Daily Brieﬁng could now be updated several times a day carryingnews from one region to the next around the clock. The global connec-tivity of the team also meant that the local line managers felt closer tothe CEO’s agenda and more able to inﬂuence the global agenda via theirlocal communications representative.
The issues audit also helped to drive home improvements in the in-
ternal communications channels. The combination of powerful technol-
ogy platforms and highly creative IT managers had resulted in much ofthe intranet being ‘sexy but difﬁcult to navigate and to use’. The auditdemanded greater clarity and simplicity and this helped to drive a reduc-tion in web sites from 1300 to 200, and a more ‘ﬁt for purpose’ approachto developing and managing content.
These improvements to the communications infrastructure both sup-
ported the tight management of ‘Living FAST’ messages, and substanti-
ated them in terms of delivering greater focus, more effective service andenhanced global team working.180 Appendices

181
KNOW. NOW
Reuters’ external brand was one of the key points of discussion during
the ‘June 11’ workshops. It was generally felt that Reuters was a greatbrand, but the company was under-investing in this vital asset comparedto key competitors like Bloomberg. On ‘June 11’, the global marketingteam literally ‘worked around the clock’ on the most effective wayforward, and building on much of the work conducted the previous year,committed to a brand relaunch in the early Autumn of 2003. The newbrand positioning that resulted from this work focused on Reuters’unique ability to bring together all the information sources, tools andaccess that their customers needed to act fast and with conﬁdence. Thenew external brand proposition, summed up in the new tag line ‘Know.Now’, was felt to address the needs of the customer in a concise andimpactful way, and to further reinforce the organisational values of ‘LivingFAST’.
With the success of ‘June 11’ still fresh in mind, the marketing team
used a number of similar techniques to launch ‘Know. Now’ internally aweek before the new campaign was launched externally. Local senior man-agement teams were equipped with everything they needed to brief theirteams (including presentations, scripts, and copies of the forthcomingadvertising campaign) and run workshop style sessions to invite people’sideas and support behind delivering the external brand promise. The pos-itive reception that the marketing campaign received internally, despitecontinued cost cutting and redundancies in other areas, was a further tes-tament to the power of employee communication and involvement inwinning support for change.
Embedding the Values
While the style and intent of the ‘June 11’ event, the issues audit andresponse, and the subsequent ‘Know. Now’ brieﬁngs had done much toembody the FAST values, the step that probably had the greatest effecton making the FAST values real for people was to incorporate them intothe performance management system. In the issues audit and ‘June 11’workshop sessions, employees had called for feedback on their perform-ance that (a) reﬂected broader input than just that of their immediateAppendix 1: Reuters Case Study

manager and (b) focused on ‘how’ they worked and not just on ‘what’ they
achieved. Anne Bowerman, a member of the ‘Living FAST’ core team andhead of the learning and development function in HR, responded byincorporating ‘FAST Feedback’ into the performance managementprocess. The new approach, launched in October 2003, involved a 360-degree component in which employees nominate 6–8 colleagues toprovide their reviewing managers with input on speciﬁc ways in whichthe employees exhibit the FAST values. The managers consolidate the‘FAST Feedback’, include a FAST rating in performance review forms,and discuss the themes with employees during review meetings. Theapproach to performance management also changed. While formalreviews are still held once a year, there is now much more emphasis oninformal performance feedback quarterly, or even monthly.
‘Fast Forward’ targets have been incorporated into executive bonus
awards, and into a global ‘Living FAST’ recognition scheme, which pub-
licly rewards exemplary performance according to the FAST values
Knowing Reuters, Knowing Our Customers
During ‘June 11’ Tom Glocer had committed to another event the fol-lowing year. Given the pace of change that the organisation had experi-enced over the intervening period, it was decided that the June event in2004 should act as a re-induction programme for Reuters’ employees.With the primary focus on how Reuters delivers value to its customers,Reuters created an Expo style programme of events with exhibitions inseven locations around the world and via the intranet. Following a brief-ing on the progress that had been made since ‘June 11’, employees werethen given the opportunity to contribute to 18 separate stands where theycould receive a further brieﬁng on different elements of the Reuters’ busi-ness and it primary customer segments. Recognising that people werelikely to start with different levels of understanding, the event offered aﬂexible approach, with employees left to decide which stands they feltwould offer them greatest value. This programme was supported withboth business TV and web-based e-learning programmes for those unableto attend the Expo and for people who wanted to extend or reinforce whatthey had picked up from the Expo experience.182 Appendices

183
Measuring Success
In the survey carried out in November 2004, 87% of employees said they
fully support the values for which Reuters stands. In the ﬁrst year of ‘FastForward’, there was a nine-point increase in the percentage of employeeswho felt Reuters had a well-formulated strategy for the present, and thatmeasure increased a further six points in the November 2004 survey. Thisemployee conﬁdence in the ‘Fast Forward’ programme was also borne outby the company’s results. The reported ﬁgures for 2003 saw the Groupreturn to proﬁt, and Reuters’ shares increased in value by 60% during2004, making it was one of the strongest performers in the FTSE 100that year.
Culture change on this scale is not for the faint-hearted. Events dictated that it
acts decisively and its coherent, integrated approach gave it the best chance possi-ble to meet its targets for recovery in the short term, and create an enterprise moreresponsive to market challenges and opportunities into the future.Appendix 1: Reuters Case Study

Appendix 2: Tesco Case Study
With over 960 stores and 230 000 employees ,Tesco has risen to become the most
dominant supermarket chain in the UK and the most successful at exporting this
success into international markets. Tesco’s leadership team claim that the company’sgrowing market share and proﬁtability are directly connected to the superior servicecustomers receive from its employees. The high levels of employee satisfaction and com-mitment that underpin this performance have, in turn, been supported by the devel-opment of a powerful employer brand proposition and values that provide consistenttouchstones for every management action that impacts on the employee experience.
The Business Context
In 1992 it was a different story. Tesco was Britain’s second biggest super-market chain, but struggling. European discount stores were beginningto make inroads into Britain, and investment analysts feared that theyoung proﬁle of Tesco’s customer base would put them at greater dangerthan their main rivals. Tesco’s share price fell by 40%.
It was the year that the future CEO, Terry Leahy, was appointed mar-
keting director. As he recalls: ‘It was a deﬁning period and from that time
we began to change the philosophy and direction of the business.’ Tesco’srecovery strategy was to listen more carefully to customers and drive inno-vation to meet their needs better than any other retailer.
Transforming the Customer Experience
In the next few years, under the new marketing tagline ‘Every LittleHelps’, Tesco introduced over 100 new initiatives to improve the shop-ping experience of its customers. These included the ﬁrst ever nationwide

customer loyalty scheme, ‘Clubcard’, the ‘One in Front’ checkout system
designed to minimise queuing time, and a series of price-cutting initia-tives, including a new ‘Value Line’ range. Tesco’s strategy to invest inhypermarkets, at a time when its main rival, Sainsbury’s, stuck to its mid-sized supermarket formula, also proved to be a vital component in its sub-sequent rise to pre-eminence.
Customer Insight Unit
The year 1995, in which Tesco overtook Sainsbury’s to become the UK’sleading grocery retailer, was also marked by the creation of its CustomerInsight Unit (CIU). Moving beyond the conventional market researchunit, the CIU represented the ﬁrst retail department of its type in theUK to draw together all the previous fragmentary sources of customerinformation, including the increasingly sophisticated analysis of ‘Club-card’ data, that could throw light on the attitudes, behaviours, needs andaspirations of its customers.
Terry Leahy and the First Values Programme
When Terry Leahy was appointed the new CEO in 1997, he took over acompany that was on the up. He also realised that there was still a longway to go. Leahy was adamant that Tesco needed to establish a way ofworking that would keep it ahead of its competitors and that, to supportthis, Tesco needed to clarify its values. Following a signiﬁcant period ofemployee research and management consultation, Tesco introduced ﬁvecore values and eight people statements in a relatively low key way duringthe summer of 1997.
•Core Value Statements1. Understand customers better than anyone.2. Be energetic, innovative and take risks in making life better for
customers.
3. Use intelligence, scale and technology to deliver unbeatable values
to customers in everything we do.
4. Recognise that we have brilliant people, use this strength to
make our customers’ shopping enjoyable in a way no competitor
can.186 Appendices

187 Appendix 2: Tesco Case Study
5. Earn the respect of our staff for the values and appreciate their
contribution;
•People Statements
1. Tesco people are all retailers, there’s one team, the Tesco team.2. Tesco people reward their staff for creating value for customers.3. Tesco people are encouraged to take risks, give support and don’t
blame.
4. Tesco people talk to their staff, listen to what they say and share
knowledge so that it can be used.
5. Tesco people trust and respect each other.
6. Tesco people respect all customers, the community, suppliers and
competition.
7. Tesco people strive for personal excellence in everything we do –
we leave no stone unturned in order to do it right.
8. Tesco people have fun, celebrate success and learn from failure.
This internal launch was supported with posters and credit card sizedcards, but as a senior Tesco manager later admitted, there was no realinfrastructure to support the values and ‘no pain for not living them’.
Soon after the launch, Tesco’s employee survey, ‘Viewpoint’, was used
to benchmark the degree to which employees currently associated thecompany with these core values and people statements. The ﬁndings indi-cated that Tesco had signiﬁcant challenges to address if it was to meetthe aspirations deﬁned in many of these statements. The most positiveemployee associations with Tesco were those relating to customers. Forexample, 84% associated ‘respecting our customers’, 82% ‘delivering thebest value to customers’ and 75% ‘taking chances to exceed customerneeds’, with working for Tesco. However, only 40% of employees believedthat what they did was valued by the company, only 43% felt ‘valued bytheir immediate Manager/Supervisor’ and only 44% associated ‘being listened to and having your opinion valued’ with working for Tesco. Asummary report at the time concluded that few of the employee-centredvalues were particularly positive.
Re-addressing the Values
While some progress was made in addressing the key issues underlyingthese ﬁndings during the course of 1998, the most signiﬁcant

breakthroughs followed the appointment of a dedicated Values Manager,
Jo Baily, in early 1999. Results from the latest ‘Viewpoint’ survey con-tinued to reveal that employees felt less valued than customers. Havingalready recognised a strong link between customer satisfaction andemployees’ perceptions that ‘we look after our people’, the managementteam at Tesco knew this imbalance needed more attention. In response tofrequent criticisms that the values were too complicated, both in termsof their number and ‘management speak’ language, Tesco set out againto consult with employees to help to identify a set of values that wouldresonate more strongly with the organisation as a whole. During thisperiod, active senior support was evident with the Board meeting threetimes just to discuss the ‘values’. The result was two core values, and ashortened and more concisely worded list of supporting value statements,as follows:
1.‘No-one tries harder for customers’
– Understand customers better than anyone– Be energetic, be innovative and be ﬁrst for customers– Use our strengths to deliver unbeatable value for customers– Look after our people so they can look after our customers
2.‘Treat people as we like to be treated’– All retailers, there’s one tea m… The Tesco Team
– Give support to each other and praise more than criticise.– Ask more than tell, and share knowledge so that it can be used.– Trust and respect each other.– Strive to do our very best.– Enjoy work, celebrate success and learn from experience.
Embedding the Values
These values were the topic of Terry’s keynote speech to the top 1500Tesco managers in September 1999. This initial launch was then followedby a series of values workshops run for the next tier of managers by seniorline management ‘champions’, and a wider communications cascade forgeneral shop assistants. The values workshop programme attended bygeneral shop assistants was positioned as one of eight modules in a widertraining programme.188 Appendices

189
Drawing on their experience from the previous values programme,
Tesco realised that embedding the values would require far more than a
one-off brieﬁng. One of the steps Tesco took to help managers to in-ternalise these values was to incorporate them into a new 360-degree feed-back process which covered: living the values, delivering for customersand ‘taking people with them’. An award scheme for living the valueswas also established for staff, with people encouraged to make awards toanyone they felt demonstrated the values, with a copy posted to the recipi-ents’ line manager. While there was some initial cynicism, this became avery popular initiative among staff and managers alike.
The Employer Brand Proposition
In January 2001, David Fairhurst joined Tesco as Resourcing Directorwith a remit to look at every aspect of the Tesco offer to employees.Drawing on his experience from Smithkline Beecham, where he haddeveloped and implemented a successful employer brand strategy, Davidset out to build on the values programme with a broader, more holisticapproach to managing the employee experience of Tesco.
With help from members of the CIU, Tesco established a People
Insight Unit (PIU), and set about achieving a similar level of insight into
their employees as they had with customers. Starting with a nationwideprogramme of focus groups with both employees and people from outsidethe company, Tesco ran a survey called ‘Your Lif e…Y our Future’ which
focused on what their employees most valued about working at Tesco,and their work–life aspirations for the future. The ﬁndings from thisresearch helped Tesco to identify four leading factors that drove com-mitment to Tesco:
1.Trust and respect – The most important commitment driver for most
employees was having a positive relationship with their workmates
and manager.
2.An interesting job – The second most important commitment driver
for many was the degree of interest they found in the jobs they
performed.
3.The opportunity to get on – This related to the opportunity to improve
on their current pay package and beneﬁts, and advance their career.Appendix 2: Tesco Case Study

4.A boss who supports me – This related to the general level of support
people received in terms of communication with their line manager,
control over their workload, and opportunities for training and development.
This became the ‘employee shopping list’ of priorities, matching the‘shopping list’ of key priorities Tesco had earlier deﬁned for customers.Together with the core values, these four employee priorities became theguiding principles for developing a more coherent employer brand propo-sition for employees.
The Steering Wheel
Both the ‘Customer’ proposition and the ‘People’ [employer brand]proposition are incorporated within a management tool that Tesco callthe ‘Steering Wheel’ (Figure A2.1). The Steering Wheel lies at the heartof the company’s business planning strategy, with ‘Financial’ and ‘Opera-tions’ making up two further quadrants. Tesco uses this ‘balanced score-card’ framework to deﬁne its goals and deliverables. They have stated thatin ‘being customer focused, efﬁcient in our operations and keeping ourpeople at the heart of all we do’ the ﬁnance delivers itself. Each segmentsets the business priorities for the year ahead and is driven and monitoredby Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which set ‘challenging but achiev-able’ targets for the business. Each KPI is backed by a business case, quan-tifying the expected beneﬁts, and owned by a speciﬁc director.
The Steering Wheel is linked to the objectives of all employees, linking
strategy to their everyday work. The Steering Wheel is also displayed in
every department and store, with a simple trafﬁc light system used toindicate whether they are on track. The KPIs are measured and reportedto the Board each quarter, with a summary report sent to the top 2000managers to cascade to their staff.
Delivering on the Employer Brand Promises
The ‘People’ segments of the Steering Wheel represent the core focus of the ‘People Plan’, which shapes many of the critical factors inﬂuenc-ing the employee relationship with Tesco, such as remuneration and190 Appendices

191 Appendix 2: Tesco Case Study
reward, management development, training, performance management,
internal communication and recruitment. This plan is owned by thegroup HR function, and informed by fortnightly meetings of a cross-Functional ‘People Matters Group’, who help to monitor the progress ofthe ‘People Plan’.
My Manager Supports Me to Do a Good Job
HR policies and processes are highly centralised at Tesco, with each storegoverned by a detailed routines handbook closely specifying how eachtask should be performed. While this plays an important role in creatingthe framework for employer brand management, it is widely recognisedF
IN
A
NCIALCUSTOMEROPERATIO
N
S
PEOPLEEARN LIFETIME LOYALTYAPPEALING T
O ALLVALUE FOR MONEYINNOVA
TIONHELPFULNES
S
CHEAPER FOR TESCOSIMPLER FOR STAFF
BETTERFOR CUSTOMERS
MY MANAGER SUPPORTS ME TODO A G
OOD JOB
I HAVE THEOPPORTUNITY
TO
GET ONMY
JOB
IS INTEREST
INGWE TRU
ST
AN
DRESP
ECT E
ACH
O
THERGROW SALES
MAXIMISE PROFIT
MANAGE OUR INVESTMENT
Figure A2.1 The ‘Steering Wheel’. Source: Tesco (2004)

192 Appendices
that the most critical factor in delivering the employer brand experience
is how middle managers and supervisors interact with their staff on aneveryday basis. This belief was reinforced by a research study conductedin 2003. A team of independent researchers were asked to study four Tescosupermarkets located in similar towns, one a high performer, one a lowperformer and two average performers. The team were unaware of theﬁnancial performance of each store when they conducted the research, butwere spot on when asked to identify the relative ranking of each store interms of performance after they had conducted their study. The high-performing store recorded signiﬁcantly higher employee satisfaction withHR policies, their line managers and the level of inﬂuence they had overtheir own jobs. The scores on all four of these dimensions were signiﬁ-cantly lower in the poorly performing store. Interestingly, the averageperformers recorded similarly high levels of commitment to Tesco as anemployer, but scored less well on satisfaction with line managers and jobinﬂuence. The conclusions from this ‘Black Box’ study were clear. FromTesco’s perspective it supported their belief that the strongest factorimpacting customer satisfaction was employees, and the strongest factorimpacting employees was the store manager.
Tesco’s approach to driving higher quality people management at store
level has incorporated four main thrusts.
1. Highly targeted management recruitment (based on attitude as well
as skills).
2. Ensuring that managers understand and share the core values.
3. High levels of investment in training and development, with a strong
emphasis on management style (particularly high visibility and
approachability).
4. Continual assessment of management competence through perform-
ance review, 360-degree feedback and employee survey measures.
Following the values roll-out in 1999, Tesco embarked on a signiﬁcantprogramme of retraining for all 12 000 managers. This training equippedthem to deﬁne people’s roles more clearly, provide greater support tofront-line staff, communicate better, and address the factors that wouldmake work more satisfying and the workplace more effective.
There has also been a consistent emphasis in recent years to ‘turn the
organisation upside down’, as one senior executive put it, so that the lead-

193
ership team see their role as supporting the wider management team
rather than imposing solutions on them, and expect managers to treattheir own staff accordingly. To reinforce the value placed on understand-ing and supporting front-line personnel, head ofﬁce managers are encour-aged to make regular store visits. Leahy led from the front in making thisa priority by signing up to spend a week working in-store on the check-out, at the ﬁsh counter and in the warehouse.
Tesco also discovered that one of the biggest factors obstructing the
store managers from getting on and managing their staff effectively was
perceived to be the signiﬁcant amounts of time they felt they had to spend‘making sense’ of the multitude of initiatives sent in their direction fromhead ofﬁce. The current HQ mantra, reﬂected in the ‘Operations’ quad-rant of the Steering Wheel, is ‘Better for customers’, ‘Simpler for staff’,and ‘Cheaper for Tesco’. More rigorous application of this ﬁlter to newinitiatives has helped signiﬁcantly in cutting down the load and freeingup store managers’ time to ‘look after people so they can look after ourcustomers’.
The Opportunity to Get on
Tesco puts a great deal of emphasis in sharing its ﬁnancial success with its employees. As Terry Leahy has said, ‘There has been a very signiﬁcant increase in the pay of all our people, paid for by big increasesin productivity. We pay them as well as we can and they are very motivated.’ Average pay for staff in stores is now higher than all its com-petitors and there are a range of other wealth-sharing schemes. Tesco’s‘Save as you earn’ scheme, open to all staff completing one year’s service,has delivered signiﬁcant returns to those participating since it was ﬁrst established in 1999. The schemes offered to Tesco staff in October2002 attracted over 63 000 applications. Tesco also runs a proﬁt sharescheme that recently distributed £38 million worth of shares to 75 000employees.
In addition to ‘getting on’ ﬁnancially, Tesco also has a strong belief in
promoting from within. David Fairhurst, Tesco’s global resourcing direc-tor, continues to stress that wherever possible the company promotes fromwithin to ﬁll new posts. This is supported by a staff-training package(‘Bronze, Silver, Gold’) and talent-spotting programme that helps to iden-tify and develop management potential.Appendix 2: Tesco Case Study

Trust and Respect
Trust and respect lie at the heart of Tesco’s core people value: ‘Treat people
as we like to be treated.’ Developing the behaviours that support thisvalue are a key component in Tesco management training and evaluation.Trust and respect are also demonstrated by means of the wide range offorums provided for employees to express their opinions and ideas. Inaddition to the ‘Viewpoint’ survey, Tesco runs regular brieﬁng and dis-cussion sessions for in-store staff and participation in Tesco’s ideas andsuggestions schemes are high, reﬂecting the regular implementation ofstaff-generated improvement ideas.
Employee Segmentation and Flexible Offerings
Customer segmentation is a powerful marketing tool that Tesco have usedto great effect. Analysing data from its 10 million Tesco Clubcard holders,Tesco has tailored its offering to major subgroups within the marketthrough its ‘Finest’, ‘Fair Trade’, ‘Organic’, ‘Healthy Living’ and ‘Value’ranges. It is typical of Tesco’s ‘joined-up’ management approach that ithas begun to apply similar tools and techniques to tailoring its employ-ment offer to different subgroups of employees.
Combining data from the Viewpoint census survey with the ﬁndings
from ‘Your lif e…Y our Future’ survey, the People Insight Unit identi-
ﬁed ﬁve attitudinal segments, representing different attitudes towardsemployment. The two most common types were found to be: ‘ Work–Life
Balancers ’, who placed more importance on ﬂexible working than pro-
motion, and ‘ W ant It All ’ employees, the most ambitious and demand-
ing group, whose loyalty was dependent on good money, good prospectsfor promotion and challenging work. The group forecast to most increasein size over the coming years was the ‘ Pleasure Seekers ’, who generally
appeared to take more interest in their leisure time than pride in theirwork.
Tesco believes that this kind of analysis foreshadows a new strategic
direction for motivation strategy, and has increasingly sought to tailorbeneﬁts, recognition and other incentive policies around speciﬁc em-ployee types, groups and preferences. This includes offering cash alterna-tives to peripheral beneﬁts such as company cars, life assurance and private194 Appendices

195
health schemes. Tesco details each package in personalised beneﬁts state-
ments, so all employees understand the value of the beneﬁts that are pro-vided. It has helped to identify new forms of incentive, such as the‘holiday discount club’, which was expected to be highly motivating toa signiﬁcant number of staff. It has also prompted a greater focus on ﬂexi-bility. Tesco’s reward manager Richard Sullivan commented that ‘Therehas been a swing away from the importance of the ﬁnancial package. Iam seeing more people taking career breaks, going part time and so on,and it is important that the company supports these kinds of activities.’
Diversity
A further aspect of Tesco’s desire to understand the different needs andaspirations of its employees has been reﬂected in the research conductedto underpin its diversity policy. For example, Tesco has recently com-pleted an important study evaluating the primary motivations of its older(50+) employees, having recognised the growing importance of this age
group in the labour market, and the distinct beneﬁts they can potentially
bring to the workplace.
Measurement of Success
Tesco’s most recent ‘Viewpoint’ staff survey recorded staff satisfaction atan all time high of 81%. This ‘Viewpoint’ survey was also the ﬁrst toshow a positive green light (on the trafﬁc light scale) for all Tesco’s values,in all its divisions, since the values were ﬁrst established in 1997. Tescoenjoys some of the best employee retention rates in the retail sector, withtheir latest published ﬁgures claiming an annual turnover of 18% for storeemployees, 7% for distribution and 8% for head ofﬁce (for all staff withmore than one year’s service).
The ﬁgures from Tesco’s regular customer panels, which include ques-
tions on employee behaviour and service, demonstrate high levels of praisefor staff attitudes, underpinning consistently high levels of customer satisfaction.
Tesco’s winning combination of great customer brand, great people
brand, and tight operational and ﬁnancial management have helped it togenerate signiﬁcant year on year business growth since 1997, with aAppendix 2: Tesco Case Study

record 16.3% increase in sales and full year proﬁt of £1.6 billion for the
year ending February 2004. Terry Leahy, CEO, stated:
It takes a generation. We’ve had to change completely the way we
manage. Change at Tesco has been across the board, but internally coher-e n t…W hat’s important is that you live the values. They have to be
central to the way you manage in order to affect processes and projects,and how people wor k…I t ’ s been evolution, not revolution. Rapid
evolution.196 Appendices

Appendix 3: Extract from Greggs’
Performance Development
Review Guidance Notes (2004)
USING VALUES WITHIN THE REVIEW DISCUSSION
Manager’s Checklist
1.Enthusiastic (keen, positive and willing)
•The review is important to individuals – it’s quality time spent
with their manager focusing solely on them as individuals. They
will also have spent time preparing for the meeting.
•This might be the eighth review you’ve conducted in the last two
weeks but you still need to be as enthusiastic about the last as theﬁrst!
•Be keen to take on board the views of the individual.
•Prepare properly for each review, not just the documentation but
consider the environment. Have you allocated sufﬁcient time, isthe venue suitable for the individual, have you ensured that therewill be no phone interruptions?
2.Supportive (good listener, helpful, encouraging)
•Listen to what the individual has to say – both facts and feelings.
•Encourage the individual to reﬂect on performance and learningpoints.
•Listen to what the individual says and doesn’t say. Remember touse the skills of questioning and active listening – concentrate onthis review, not the next one you’re doing!

3.Open and honest (truthful, trustworthy, approachable, open
minded)
•Be open and honest with the individual in terms of his/her per-
formance and aspirations.
•Encourage the individual to ‘open-up’ to you.
•Keep an open mind yourself – don’t prejudge situations withoutfully listening to all the facts – sometimes we can be wrong!
•Individuals may pick up on some things that you haven’t con-sidered – be receptive! It might well be a better idea or a validpoint.
4.Consideration (thinking of others, being understanding, caring for
people and the environment)
•Consider the manner in which you have to deliver certain mess-ages and balance with being open and honest.
•When booking the time, consider whether it’s suitable for bothyou and the individual. Ensure that it doesn’t clash with othercommitments.
•Think of the time you have allocated, particularly if it is the ﬁrsttime you have used the new process. Ensure that it is sufﬁcient(approximately 3 hours).
•Don’t overbook the number of reviews you do in a day. Not onlywill it affect the quality of time you spend with each individual,but think of yourself – you will be exhausted by the end!
5.Respect (valuing individuals, treating others as they would wish to
be treated)
•Again consider your approach when delivering difﬁcult messages.
•Value individuals for the contribution they are making to overall
business success – and tell them!
6.Fairness (no favouritism, consistent, seeing from both sides)
•Be aware of your own prejudices. Don’t focus on one aspect or thelatest situation. Remember the review is about overall perform-ance over the last 12 months.
•Always consider the facts of the situation – apply the role proﬁlemeasures and ratings consistently across your team.
•Consider the whole team when setting objectives – look at devel-opment need, not working relationship!
•Ensure that opportunities are open to all and applied equally.198 Appendices

199
7.Appreciative (saying thank you and recognising achievement)
•Individuals will have put a lot of time into preparing for their
review. Thank them for their time and contribution!
•Recognise each individual’s achievement and say so!
•If individuals have performed well – praise them, recognisingtheir contribution to the business.
Checklist for Individuals Participating in a Review
1.Enthusiastic (keen, positive and willing)
•Be prepared to get fully involved – remember it’s a two-way process.Do your preparation and participate fully in the review itself.
•Value the one-to-one time you will be spending with yourmanager. Have a positive approach – your manager is spendingthis time for your beneﬁt!
•Think of the outcomes in a positive way. Have a ‘can do’ men-tality not ‘I won’t be able to achieve this’.
2.Supportive (good listener, helpful, encouraging)
•Listen to the feedback you are receiving, both the facts and theway your manager might be feeling.
•Recognise that while you might be seeking support from yourmanager, equally you may be asked to support others. Be preparedto help!
3.Open and honest (truthful, trustworthy, approachable, open minded)
•Use this opportunity to be open with your manager about how
you feel – both the good things and the not so good things aboutthe job. Equally, your manager will be telling you how she/heviews your performance. Recognise that their view might be dif-ferent to yours – be open minded with the feedback you receive.
•360-degree feedback is about other people’s perceptions of you –again this may differ in some circumstances to your view. Bereceptive to the comments made!
4.Consideration (thinking of others, being understanding, caring for
people and the environment).
•Consider your manager! Remember that while this is your onlyreview, your manager could be responsible for conducting upwardsof 8 to 10.Appendix 3: Extract from Greggs’ Performance Development Review

5.Respect (valuing individuals, treating others as they would wish to
be treated)
•If you have an issue to discuss with your manager, think about the
way you put your point across.
6.Fairness (no favouritism, consistent, seeing from both sides)
•Value your manager’s opinion and those taking time to provide
you with 360-degree feedback.
•Try to learn from the information you are receiving.
7.Appreciative (saying thank you and recognising achievement)
•Recognise the time your manager has taken in preparing for your
review and those who have completed the 360-degree feedback.Thank them for their contribution.200 Appendices

References
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14. Fletcher, W . (2002) Beating the 24/7 , John Wiley & Sons.
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18. Goleman, D. (1996) Emotional Intelligence , Bloomsbury Publishing.
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1.The Economist (September 2004) Sir Alistair Morton’s Obituary.
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11. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002).12. Accounting Standards Board (2003).13. Vlasic, B. and Stretz, B. (2000) Taken for a Ride: How Daimler-Benz Drove
off with Chrysler , John Wiley & Sons.
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1. ‘The War for Talent’ (1998), The McKinsey Quarterly , Issue 3.
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4.Gazette , the Magazine of the John Lewis Partnership (2005), Vol. 87 (10).
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Great Brand Experience , FT Prentice Hall, pp. 64–67.
2. Mercer (2003) What’s Working (US/UK).
3. Financial Times/MORI survey (June 2003).
4.Veracity Test (February 2003) British Medical Association.
5. MORI (May, 2003) Nestlé Family Monitor.
6. See J.K. Galbraith’s work on modern capitalism.202 References

203
Chapter 6
1.Unilever Code of Business Principles (2003).
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Review , January–February, No. 6108.
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CIPD.
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Purpose , FT Prentice Hall.
Chapter 7
1. Survey Findings: Emerging Trends in Internal Branding (2000/2001),
Lincolnshire, IL: Hewitt Associates LLC.
2. Dell and Ainspan (2001) Engaging Employees Through Your Brand , The Con-
ference Board, Research Report 1288-01-RR.
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Talent Report.
5.United States at Work 2000 (2000) AON Consulting.
6.Linking Employee Satisfaction With Productivity, Performance and Satisfaction
(2003) Corporate Leadership Council.
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8.Maximizing Attendance, Managing Best Practice (2000) The Industrial Society,
No. 67.
9.Achieving High Performance in Retail Banking, The Driving Role of Employee
Opinion on Customer Satisfaction and Sales Performance (2003) ISR.
10.Engaging the American Worker (2005) TNS North America Stakeholder Man-
agement Center.
11.Understanding the People and Performance Link: Unlocking the Black Box (2003)
Work and Employment Research Centre, University of Bath, CIPD.
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Chain: How Leading Companies Link Proﬁt and Growth to Loyalty, Satisfaction
and Value , New York, Free Press.
13.From People to Proﬁts (1999) The Institute for Employment Studies.
14. ‘Q12 Workplace Survey’, quoted from Business Superbrands (2000) published
by Superbrands Ltd.
15. Kingsmill, D. (2003) Accounting for People , DTI.
16.Linking Employee Satisfaction with Productivity, Performance and Customer Sat-isfaction (2003) Corporate Leadership Council.References

17.Employee Commitment in Europe: Characteristics, Causes and Consequences (2002)
ISR.
18.Work USA (2002) Watson Wyatt Worldwide.
19.A Portfolio of Best Companies to Work for in the UK (2003) Frank Russell
Company.
20. Gladwell, M. (2000) The Tipping Point , Little, Brown & Company.
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22. Ulrich, D. (1997) Human Resource Champions , Harvard Business School Press.
23. Ambler, T. (2002) Marketing and the Bottom Line , FT Prentice Hall.
24. Pringle, H. and Gordon, W . (2001) Brand Manners , John Wiley & Sons.
Chapter 8
1.Creating Competitive Advantage From your Employees: A Global Study Of
Employee Engagement (2004) ISR.
2.Working Today: What Drives Employee Engagement (2003) The Towers Perrin
Talent Report.
3.The Drivers of Employee Engagement (2004) The Institute For Employment
Studies.
4.Work USA (2002) Watson Wyatt.
5.Employee Commitment Links to Bottom Line Success (2002), TNS.
6.UK plc: Leaders or Follower (2001) ISR.
7. Hofstede, G. (1997) Cultures and Organisations – Software of the Mind , New
York, McGraw-Hill.
8. Trompenaars, F. and Hampden-Turner, C. (1998) Riding the W aves of Culture ,
New York, McGraw-Hill.
9. Myers, I. and Briggs, M. (1995) Gifts Differing, Understanding Personality
Type, Davies-Black.
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1.The Sunday Times (2004) 17 October, ‘Finding Staff Who Fit Your Brand’.
2. Jones, R. (2000) The Big Idea , HarperCollins.
3. First Direct website.4.Building and Sustaining a High Performance Workforce (2003) Horizon Watch-
ing Position Papers, www.naa.org/horizon
5.The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers (2004) High Fliers Publications.
6. Milligan, A and Smith, S. (2002) Uncommon Practice: People Who Deliver a
Great Brand Experience , FT Prentice Hall.
7. Microsoft website.204 References

205
Chapter 10
1. Ind, N. (2001) Living The Brand: How To Transform Every Member of your
Organisation into a Brand Champion , Kogan Page.
2. Dyke, G. (2004) Inside Story , HarperCollins.
Chapter 11
1.Employee Commitment in Europe: Characteristics, Causes and Consequences (2002)
ISR.
2.The Ethical Employee (2001) The Work Foundation.
3.Good Companies, Better Employees (2003) The Corporate Citizenship
Company.
4. Vodafone website, www.vodafone.com
5. Unilever website, www.unilever.com6. Johnson, M. (2004) The New Rules of Engagement: Life–Work Balance and
Employee Commitment , CIPD.
7.The Sunday Times (2004) 17 October, ‘Finding Staff Who Fit Your Brand’.
8.The Drivers of Employee Engagement (2004) The Institute for Employment
Studies.
9. Michaels, E., Handﬁeld-Jones, H. and Axelrod, B (2001) The W ar for Talent ,
Harvard Business School Press.
10.Creating Competitive Advantage from your Employees: A Global Study of EmployeeEngagement (2004) ISR.
11. Winter, J. and Jackson, C. (1999) Riding the W ave, The New Global Career
Culture , Career Innovation Research Group.
12.Engaging the American Worker (2005) TNS North America Stakeholder Man-
agement Center.
13.Vodafone Life (May 2003) Issue 8.References

absenteeism
costs 73
sickness 70, 71, 103–4stress-related 35
Accenture 26, 61Accounting Standards Board 28, 34Added Value Group 74Allied-Domecq 129, 130alumni 158–9Ambassadors segment 101Ambivalent segment 102Ambler, Tim 7, 41, 80Anchor Butter 34Arend, Jeremy van den 21Army 21–2AstraZeneca 52AT&T 5audiences 103authenticity 61Avis 77Avon 5–6Ayer Barker 5
Bailey, Michael 47, 135
Baily, Jo 188Bank of England 98Barclaycard 5Barclays 136Barnard, Catharine 18BAT 24Baum, Steve 135Baumann, Bob 40BBC 89, 120, 141–2‘behavioural bubbles’ 169Bell, Anne Marie 173, 174benchmarking 89–91, 92beneﬁts 123–5Best Foods 3, 4best practice sharing 112Besto 140Bic 62Bland, Sir Christopher 18BMP 6BNB Resources plc 23BOAC 29–30Boase, Martin 6Body Shop 74Boggis-Rolfe, Richard 24Bowden, Patrick 4Bowerman, Anne 182Bowman, Bob 40Boyd, Pattie 42BP 77, 121brand advocacy 107brand communication 67–8, 129–46brand consistency 65–6, 112, 142brand development 65–7brand differentiation 61–3brand engagement 135–41, 142–3brand engagement model 131–2brand hierarchy 63–4brand identity 109–10, 112, 129–30brand integration 110–11brand integrity 110brand language 133–4brand loyalty 107
Index

208 Index
brand management 4, 65–7, 147–62
core principles of 48–50
brand mapping 107–8
brand mix 142, 149, 150, 160brand party 98brand personality 60–1, 122–3brand positioning 57, 61–3brand promise 57brand proposition 57, 74, 75, 117–19brand reality 64–5, 95, 121brand reality model 113–14brand relaunch 132–4brand roots 95–6brand vision 64–5, 95brand vision model 116brandwash 129, 131Branson, Richard 18, 61, 82Britain’s Top Employers 28
British Airline Pilots Association 10, 15British Airways 10, 19, 22British Medical Association 15
veracity test 47
Broadbent, Miles 24Broadbent, Norman 6, 23, 24BT 121, 159–60Bullmore, Jeremy 53Bungay, Steven 170Burrows, Camille 148, 149Burson-Marstellar 24business integrity 139Buxton, Sir Thomas 14
Cable & Wireless 121
Cairn Energy 121Campaign 52Cape, Jonathon 5
Career Oriented segment 101
Carphone Warehouse 74, 82CBI 14celebrity 98Chadlington, Lord (Peter Gummer) 25Chanel 5, 51change agent role 40Channon, Charles 5Chappell, Tim 4Charles Barker Group 6, 23Charles Barker Human Resources 3, 4Chartered Institute of Personnel and
Development (CIPD) 21, 37, 40
Chrysler 35Clarke, Steve 176Cleese, John 10, 150Coca-Cola 60, 112Colgate 4, 46Colgate-Palmolive 3Collett Dickinson and Pearce 52commitment 141communication audits 102–3Company Oriented segment 101–2Compass Group 47, 76, 110, 121, 124,
134, 135, 159
compliance 35compliance legislation 33Conger, Jay 41content, information 102Coolidge, Calvin 21core values 120, 121corporate brand hierarchy (parent and
subsidiary) 111–13
Corporate Citizenship Company 153Corporate Development Council (USA)
40
corporate ethics 112corporate governance 29corporate parent brand 110corporate performance 8corporate reinvention 77Corporate Research Forum (UK) 40,
41
corporate vision/mission 117Corporation Research Foundation 28correlation analysis 91–2, 123Costa Coffee 64costs 69–71
of absenteeism 73
cotton industry 14

209 Index
Coutts 110
Crawford, W .S. 42
credibility 143culture mapping 93–5customer brand 110–11customer brand proposition 77–8customer brand values 120–1customer-facing brand 112customer loyalty 67–8customer satisfaction 71–3
Daimler Chrysler 34
Daimler-Benz 35Daniels, Alan 5David-Weill, Michael 38Davies, Crispin 18Deakin, Simon 18Deedes, William 16Deneuve, Catherine 51Devonshire House 40Diageo 77Direct Line 110diversity 153Donkin, Richard 40Dove deodorant 62Dr Beers 5Dunstone, Charles 74, 82durability 163–4Dyke, Greg 141, 142, 152
editorial control 102–3
education 16–17
private 19–20
Eliot, T.S. 14emotional beneﬁts of brands 58–9emotional engagement 59, 88–9,
135–41
emotional intelligence 16employee behaviour change 141–4employee commitment 88–9, 141–4employee insights 86–104employee research, continuous 92–3employee satisfaction 17employee segmentation 194–5Employee Value Propositions (EVPs)
125–6, 159
employer brand ‘wheel’ 9Enﬁeld, David 4Enron 48expenditure on HR 41external communications 143
fair competition 139
Fairhurst, David 189, 193Fedex 77feedback channels 103ﬁlm, use of 136–8ﬁnancial results 72–4First Direct 118, 120–1Fletcher, Winston 17, 18focus groups 96, 106Ford 52Forde, Martin 4Freshﬁelds 18functional beneﬁts of brands 58fund management, failure of 30Furnham, Adrian 15–16
Galbraith, J.K. 52
Gapper, John 38Gartmore Investment 27General Foods 4Gent, Christ 135Ghoshal, Sumatra 41Gildersleeve, John 6Gillette 58, 62, 63Gladwell, Malcolm 75Glenn, Martin 149Glocer, Tom 46, 47, 135, 168, 169,
171, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 182
Goleman, Daniel 20Gordon, W . 80governance 35governance legislation 33Gratton, Linda 67

210 Index
Greggs plc 157
Performance Development Review
Guidance Notes 197–200
GSK 40, 121
Guinness 61, 77Gummer, Peter 25
Haffenden, Mike 40
Halifax 143halo effect 158Hampson, Sir Stuart 42Harrison, George 42Harvey, Tom 46Health and Safety accident reports 29health screening 103–4hedge fund 30Helleu, Jacques 51Herzberg 59Heskett 72Hewlett-Packard 40Heylin, Angela 24Higgs, Sir Derek 29Hiram Walker 129Hiscox 28, 50, 160Hiscox, Robert 50, 51Hofstede, Geert: 5-D model 94Hogg, Sarah 18Horlick, Nicola 18Howard, Simon 6HSBC 52, 109human capital 27, 28human resources (HR) function
beneﬁts to 78–9centralisation of 112employee value propositions 126need for change 37–43
IBM ‘Jam Sessions’ 138–9, 141IDV 77IKEA 117Ind, Nicholas 139Ingerslev, Christian 7intangible assets 26internal communications 79–80, 143internal launch 130–2interpersonal skills 18intrapersonal skills 18investment bankers 38Investors in People 19, 158IPO 23
J. Walter Thomson 5, 53
James, Leslie 6John Lewis Department Stores 41John Lewis Partnership 41Johnson, Mike 153–4Joiners Surveys 106Jones, Allister 75Jones, Richard 117Jordan, Michael 61
Kaisen 155
Key Performance Indicators 91, 190Kidman, Nicole 51Kingﬁsher 110Kingsmill, Denise 27
labour market insights 104–8
clarifying the target market 104–5
employer brand image 106–8needs and aspirations 105–6
Lagerfeld, Karl 51Lambert, Andrew 40language, brand 133–4Law Society 15Lawler, Ed 41Lawrence, D.H. 14Lazard 38leadership, support from 81–2Leahy, Sir Terry 47, 135, 185, 186–7,
193, 196
learning and development 157–9
reward and recognition 159
leaver’s interviews 103Lego 116, 155–6Lerwill, Robert 25

211 Index
Lester, Dick 42
Lewis, Sinclair 15
litigation 17living the brand 71Lloyd Leisure 64logo, brand 65London Council of Ealing 137London Transport 16Lowe Howard Spink 52Lowe, Frank 52loyalty
brand 107customer 67–8
Luhrman, Baz 51Lynx deodorant 59, 62
Macmillan, Harold 3
Maitland, Angus 24Man Investments 20management training 112Mark, Reuben 46Market Research Society 87marketing employee value propositions
126
marketing function, beneﬁts to 80–1Marks & Spencer 34, 98, 158Marlboro 61Marples, Alex 116marriage patterns 19Marriot hotels 64Mars 4Marx, Groucho 60Masojada, Bronek 50McClauren, Iain 6McDonald’s 122McKinsey 18, 38, 106
‘War for Talent’ 13
McLuan, Marshall 136Mercedes-Benz 5mergers and acquisitions 38, 76–7Microsoft 67, 117–18, 125, 126, 135,
160
Midland Bank 77Miles Partnership 24military employer brands 13Miller, Arthur 14minimum wage, UK 14mining industry 14monolithic brand identity 112monolithic employer brand 109Montgomery, Viscount Bernard 13Morton, Sir Alistair 25Mosley, Richard 74Murray, Paddy 24Myners, Paul 27
Nationwide Building Society 46, 47, 70,
124, 144, 154, 157
PRIDE values programme 46
NatWest 110
Navy 21–2Nelson, Lord Horatio 13NHS 7Nike 61, 98Nokia 109Norman, David 7, 24Nortel Networks 72NWAyer 3, 5Nyﬁeld, Gill 39
observation 99–100
Odets, Clifford 15Odgers 24Ogilvy & Mather 5operating company brand 110Orange 147–8organisational culture 34, 93–5organisational spirit 75organisational stereotypes 98organised labour 15Orwell, George 14Oswald, Lee Harvey 18
P&G 110
parent brand 110People in Business (PiB) 7, 9, 45

212 Index
People Management Challenge 36,
37–43
Pepsi 61, 148
PepsiCo UK 148–9performance and development reviews
103
performance appraisal 157Persil 58personality
brand 60–1, 122–3of organisation 98
Personiﬁcation exercise 97PG Tips 95–6Plackett, John 4policy 149–55
external reputation 149–51internal communication 151–2internal measurement systems 154senior leadership 152service support 154–5values and corporate social
responsibility 152–4
positioning model, key components
113–16
Pottinger, Piers 24PR Company Burson Marstellar 7Price Waterhouse 7Prideaux, Michael 24Pringle, H. 80–1Procter & Gamble 4Project 2000 7projective and enabling techniques 96–9psychological contract 59, 79, 132
Quaker 148
Quirke, Bill 7
rational understanding 132–4
Ravenscroft, Keith 5RBS 110‘Real Players’ employer brand 129–30recognition, need for 18recruitment 70, 71, 104, 106, 155–8recruitment slogans 118–19redundancy 26Reed Elsevier 18Reid, David 76Reid-Dodick, John 157, 169, 170, 172relationship marketing 9reliability 117Rena, Michael 51reputation 8resistance to employer brand concept 8respect 99, 105, 123, 150, 194response/action 103Reuter, Julius 167Reuters 47, 109, 135, 157, 160, 167–83
business context 167–74core values 171–2culture and values 169‘Dream Team’ 174–7‘Fast Forward’ 46, 171, 172history 167integrating the internal and external
brand 170
‘Know. Now’ 181‘Living FAST’ framework 138, 172–4,
175–9, 179–80, 181–2, 183
Main Effort Plan 178–9Organisational Change Programme
168–9
responding to employee input 177–9
Revlon 59Revlon, Charles 59Richer, Julian 74Richer Sounds 74Robbins, Tracy 134Roberts, David 147, 148Roddick, Anita 5, 74Ronseal 58Royal Bank of Scotland Group 110Ruby, Jack 18Rushdie, Salman 5
Sainsbury’s 10–11, 27, 143, 149, 150,
186

213 Index
Sainty, Julian 24
Sainty Hurd 24
Samsung 52Sarbanes-Oxley 34Save the Children Fund 5Schlesinger, David 172Schrumpeter, Professor 51Schwartz, Jeff 50, 51Scott, C.J. 42Scott, Ridley 138Sears Roebuck 71segmentation 9, 100–2, 104–5
employee 194–5
sex discrimination 35Shadow Side, The, exercise 97Shandwick 25Sharpe Electronics 5Shell 26, 61SHL 39sickness absence 70, 71, 103–4Sigal, Clancy 14Simond, Kyrle 5, 24Simpson, Peter 121skills, technical 15–16slave trade 14Smith, Frank 42Smith’s Crisps 42SmithKline Beecham 40, 189Snow, Antony 24Sorrell, Sir Martin 25, 51–2, 53sources 102SouthWest Airlines 118Spelling, Barrie 4staff turnover 70, 71Starbucks 117Steinbeck, John 15
Stella 143
Stella Artois 66Stertz, Bradley 34Stevenson, Dennis 18Stewart, Jimmy 137stress 35, 104strikes 22sub-brands 130subsidiary employer brand 110Sullivan, Richard 195Sun Microsystems 72Sunny Side Up exercise 97Sure deodorant 62
target employee proﬁles 116–17
team management 156–7technical employee value propositions
125
Tesco 6, 47, 71, 75–6, 87, 109, 123–4,
135, 185–96
business context 185–90‘Clubcard’ 188, 194Customer Insight Unit (CIU) 186employee segmentation 194–5First Values Programme 186–7People Insight Unit (PIU) 189, 194‘Steering Wheel’ 154, 190–4
Thomas, Sir Miles 29Timberland 50–1Toplis, John 18touch-points 142Trade Union Council (TUC) 35training 158transmission channels 103transparency 99Trompenaars, Fons: seven-dimensional
model 94
Tropicana 148trust 105, 142
as employee commitment driver 123in employees 16, 194in employer brand 143in leadership 47–8
TSB 77
Ulrich, Dave 79
umbrella branding 9unfair dismissal 35Unilever 3, 64, 87, 110, 130, 139, 153
Code of Business Principles 139

214 Index
scenarios 139–40
Unions 15
United Distillers 77US Army, employer brand for 5
values
brand 59–60
customer brand 120–1organisation 119–21
Venus 62, 63Verougstraete, Chris 174, 175Virgin 61, 117Virgin Atlantic 122, 123Vlasic, Bill 34Vodafone 52, 76, 109, 135, 143, 153,
160
VW 67, 117
Waitrose 41
Walkers Crisp 148Walkers Snackfoods 138, 149Warner 106Watson, Lord Alan 24Wax, Ruby 10Wellesley, Julian 24Wellington, Duke of 13Wertheimer, Alain 51Whitbread 64Wilberforce, William 14Williamson, Philip 46, 47, 154Wiseman, Andrew 7Woodruff, William 14Woods, Tiger 61work–life balance 18–19, 105,
153–4
working environment 160working time 18–19WPP 24, 28–9, 51–3, 110
Index compiled by Annette Musker

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